


Cirque Du Sang

by Redgeandlilly



Series: Anita Blake: Night Heiress [3]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Badass normal, Butchering French language and culture, F/F, F/M, Fix-it fic, Gen, Gratuitous use of the words flavor and spill, Light Angst, Mommy Issues, Spitefic, all the homo in the world, bisexual Anita, gratuitous and possibly inaccurate French, raging bicuriosity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:29:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 35
Words: 80,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redgeandlilly/pseuds/Redgeandlilly
Summary: "Two months ago I stared into the abyss and it blinked. But the contest was close."Autumn has come to Saint Louis and as the seasons change so do the monsters. A reluctant Rudolph Storr calls Anita Blake in to consult on his newest case. Members of a new radical hate group, Humans First, are turning up dead, seemingly killed by vampires. Case open and shut, right?Wrong.When the latest victim rises, Anita discovers something she previously considered impossible. Vampiric atavism. A throwback gene that appears to be perhaps a million years old. No one has ever seen a vampire that old...until now.A deadly threat has been issued from a shadowy vampire council. The Dark Mother continues to stir, and a fresh threat presents itself in the form of Alejandro, a master vampire scarier than any she's fought before. He's intent on having her, no matter the cost. Anita is pushed deeper into preternatural politics than ever before.Only ingenuity, strength, and the help of a winsome Master of the City will help Anita, and the City of Saint Louis, come out of the brewing turf war alive.
Relationships: Jean-Claude/Anita, Jeanette/Anita, Jeanette/Gretchen, John Burke/Wheelchair Wanda, Larry Kirkland/Tammy Reynolds
Series: Anita Blake: Night Heiress [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823521
Comments: 183
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was planning do wait and write this fic for a while but had an idea that I didn't want to lose. So you're all getting this a little earlier than I planned. :) This will still probably update a little slower than the first two.

The moonlight pooled like liquid silver on the bed of wet, fallen leaves. The press of thick nimbus clouds that had hung over Saint Louis like a pall all week had meandered away, leaving the night sky clear and shining. It was a good night to hunt werewolves. 

Or it would have been if we weren't making so much noise.

I cocked my head to the side so I could cast a poisonous glare at the pair of men following me. John Burke and Larry Kirkland crunched to a stop in the matted leaves, whispers ending abruptly when they spied the look on my face. Their shoulders curled, gazes dropping to eyeball the foliage with guilt. They looked for all the world like chastised schoolboys. I guess that made me the ruler-wielding nun. 

The look was especially strange on John, who was six feet tall, lean, and blessed with movie-star good looks. The moonlight washed him out, a little, made his skin a little less dark, and made the off-center stripe of white in his hair stand out. He'd put on a hat to hide most of it, as I'd instructed, but a few hairs still peeked out under the rim of the cap. 

Larry, on the other hand, was my height. 5'3" and unusually short for a man of twenty. He was slender, rather than lean, like he'd never quite grown up. He was baby-faced, covered in freckles, and had an unflattering haircut, bestowed upon him by his college roommate. Bowl cuts should really have died out sometime in the 20th century. Until acquiring a job at Animators Inc. Larry had been broke. B-r-o-k-e _broke_. I probably would have grown a mullet rather than take the bowl cut. But hey, that was just me.

"Mind sharing your insights with the class?" I hissed. "Whatever you're talking about must be pertinent to the werewolf hunt we're on, _right_?"

Werewolves weren't the only thing we'd face tonight. This territory belonged to a master vampire. We'd no doubt meet lesser members of the Kiss tonight as well. Cannon fodder. But the wolves were my main concern. I always fared worse against animal servants than the undead. Vampires had a glut of weaknesses to exploit. Wereanimals didn't. Silver made them heal slower, but it didn't immediately kill them. They were faster than us, stronger than us, and a scratch or bite could turn you into the same thing you were hunting.

Larry adjusted his grip on Plath. I'd borrowed two of Grandma Blake's troll-hounds for this hunt. She'd been breeding them for home protection and cash since 1970. Each dog could sell upwards of eight hundred dollars. With special training, they could be worth over two thousand. She'd put my father and Aunt Mattie through college selling them to K-9 units all across the U.S. They were the only breed of dog that would track vampires and therianthropes. Originally, they'd been brought in to eliminate troll infestations, until they'd become a protected species. Edward had confessed recently that a few of the members of his organization had bought from her years back. It was part of why he'd been interested in me in the first place. Came for family history, stayed for the sweet, sweet vampire killing. 

Grandma Blake always named new litters after creative types. Authors, artists, playwrights, songwriters, and more. The seven in this litter had been composed of poets. Angelou, Plath, Brooks, Dickenson, Sappho, Rossetti, and Wheatley. 

I'd given Plath and Angelou to the boys to give them a leg up. Apparently they'd decided to treat the hunt like a walk through the dog park.

"We're sorry, Anita," Larry mumbled. "Really Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, do better," I snapped, keeping my voice as low as possible under the circumstances. It still sounded like a shout in the stillness of the night. If it sounded loud to me, it would be impossible for a wolf or vampire to miss. "What were you two gabbing about?" 

They exchanged nervous glances, sidling forward when I signaled them to move forward. They were slower than I was used to. Ordinarily, when I went on hunts like these, I had Edward for backup. Right now I had Tweedle-Dumb and Dumber. Okay, that wasn't fair. They wanted to be taught and this was a teachable moment. I shouldn't shriek at them. 

"We were just wondering how you're so...calm all the time. How you move so quietly and...well, everything. You're like a cat." 

Truthfully, the answer was that I'd had the shit kicked out of me by a wildly amoral assassin until I learned not to make rookie mistakes. They were lucky I'd tried to take a softer approach. After all, I still had to work with both of them come morning.

"Years of training. Now, will you both shut up, or do I need to send you to babysit the Jeep?" 

The stood a little straighter and despite the fact they looked nothing alike, they mirrored each other for just a moment. Determination, outrage, machismo, and a hint of sullenness rode over them in a rippling wave of testosterone. That was better. Anger wasn't necessarily ideal in a fight, but it beat the hell out of fear. Fear locked your muscles into uselessness, turned your knees to jelly, made you miss the crucial seconds when you'd take the shot that could save a life. Better angry than scared. Always. 

I turned back toward the trail. It was rarely used and I understood why. The terrain was steep, knotted with roots, and almost completely overgrown. This wasn't for the novice hiker. It was the next best thing to wilderness, which was why I'd chosen to take them along. They needed to know how to move through this stuff. 

I moved quietly, keeping a careful two-handed grip on my sidearm. The modified body armor I'd ordered was snug. Different than what I was used to, which was distracting. I wanted to tug at it, even tear it off, but I needed to set a good example for my protégés. I had to keep my head in the game as well. 

"I'm staying," Larry said stubbornly. 

"Me too," John seconded. "I need to learn to do what you do, Blake. If I'd ever done more than morgue stakings maybe..." 

His eyes went distant and a little haunted. He didn't finish the sentence and I was grateful for that. I didn't like remembering that dark, scorching August evening either. I still relieved parts of it in nightmares. I was sure John did too. We would take the truth of what actually happened that night with us to our graves.

The police believed that he'd been blackmailed into raising a corpse that the then voodoo High Priestess Dominga Salvador. Police believed she'd been unable to raise the five-hundred-year-old corpse herself and required the aid of more powerful practitioners to aid her. It explained her attack on the foremost animator in the country, Dr. Georgia Hale. The murder of Peter Burke. The kidnap of his remaining family, to force his brother's hand, and, eventually, mine. RPIT's official report stated that I'd managed to raise the corpse using the blood of a Belgian Blue. 

It was a lie. John and I had both killed human beings that night. He'd failed to raise the corpse because it was a wereanimal of significant age. I hadn't even bothered. I'd raised the cemetery, giving John a chance to escape with another of the hostages, a nephew from a half-brother he'd never known. He'd actually begun the process of adopting the kid and was dating another of the victims, a former prostitute named Wanda Conley. 

They say it takes you fifty hours with a stranger before they become a friend, ninety hours before you're really friends, and two hundred hours to become very close. So I guess maybe the real hostage situation was the friends we made along the way. 

I wasn't sure if it was entirely healthy, but John had come away from the exchange much better than I had. He had a son and a girlfriend. I had new scars and a confusing almost-relationship with a tricksy Master of the City. 

Larry and John wanted to be vampire hunters, not just executioners. Anyone could learn to wield a mallet and shove a piece of wood into a sleeping vampire's chest. It took skill to kill them while they were conscious and actively hunting you. And therianthropes...those were another animal entirely if you'll pardon the pun. 

Plath lurched onto her feet, straining toward our right. It was the only warning we had before a hair-raising howl snarl split the night, so close I thought I could have reached out to touch the sound. It cut clear to that portion of the hindbrain that screams things like "Run! Fight! Survive, damn you!" It's not even a conscious thought, just pure instinct. If you don't have the muscle memory to combat that first, squealing little impulse, you'll run or you'll swing out wildly. And that's the moment at which you die when you're facing supernaturals. You can't outrun them and you can't go at them half-cocked. 

I spun toward the sound, raising my sidearm to sight the wolf that emerged from the shadows. This was a new model, much, much different than I was used to. I hadn't wanted to take it into battle with me, but it was what was available. It felt foreign and cold in my hand and that wrongness cost me a crucial second. The shot missed and glanced harmlessly off a tree. The wolf was huge, with coloring closer to a Red Wolf, instead of the Timber Wolf-like therians I'd seen in this area. The fur was tawny and very sleek in the moonlight. I had no prayer of avoiding it, so I aimed and fired again, seconds before it impacted me. 

I'd never played football but I had to imagine getting hit by a linebacker felt something like this. Except the players had the benefit of padding and helmets, which I was sadly lacking. It would have come in handy against a wolf roughly the size of a Dartmoor Pony, which was to say that it was only a little shorter than I was, and around five hundred pounds of solid muscle. Impacting the ground with the thing on top of me felt like being gut-punched by an anvil. Air wooshed out of me in an undignified; "Oof!" 

I had managed to twist just enough to free my upper body. Everything beneath my waist had gone momentarily numb. I'd felt this sort of thing before, so I wasn't worried about paralysis. It was just the shock of impact. Adrenaline would cushion me against the pain for as long as it could and afterward I'd have to deal with how hurt I really was. 

From the waist up I was able to move, so I moved into a semi-upright position, despite the wolf's warning growl. Ye Gods, Grandma, what big teeth you have. And have you considered Listerine? I twisted so I could press the muzzle between its wolf amber eyes. They were deep, soulful, and incredibly intelligent. There was human intellect behind the layers of fur. It would be a shame to shoot him. I wouldn't unless he forced me. 

"Stop right there, Fido," I warned. It would have sounded more impressive if I weren't wheezing. "Don't make me pull the trigger." 

More wolves had emerged from the dark night around us. They were circling, keeping back from the fight. Out of my periphery, I saw Larry loose a panicked shot at the nearest vampire. She was tall and slender with dark skin. Her ebony hair had been bound into a braid so it wouldn't be within easy reach. Smart. Though, if someone was close enough to grab for her hair, they were probably in biting distance. 

The rest of her outfit was outdoorsy, sure, but not practical. Daisy Dukes rode so far up her legs that, even from this distance, I could see the firm outline of her buttocks beneath the frayed edges of the cloth. She was wearing wedges in an old-growth forest, for God's sake. The crop top would have made for breezy wearing on a summer day. It had to be freezing now. Paradoxically, she was wearing thick woolen gloves.

She shot out a hand, closing slender fingers around his throat, smiling beatifically at Larry as she lifted him from the ground. In that position, she could do a number of nasty things to him. Crush his trachea. Rake his throat open with her nails. Tear the carotid open with her teeth and let him bled out. Get a grip on the other half of his body and pull, seeing where in the middle he split apart. 

With one gloved hand, she plucked Larry's cross from his chest. It had begun to glow dully, flickering on like a stubborn ceiling light. Not fast enough. It winked out just as quickly when the vampire tossed it into the underbrush.

John wasn't doing much better. The vampire attacking him was also female. She was small, probably five feet or less, with a cap of shiny, dark hair that fell to her shoulders in an a-line cut. Tight, barely curvy body. Slender in the way that a lot of Asian women I'd met seemed to be. I couldn't see her eyes from here. John was doing his best not to meet them, lest he be rolled. She'd gotten a grip on the back of his neck and was trying to force his gaze up to meet hers. She could shatter his spine in an instant, leaving him a quadriplegic. 

Three more vampires stepped out of the treeline, and both the men were taller than the woman they flanked. Both were around six feet tall. Brunette on the left, blonde on the right. Aside from having long hair and being too pretty for words, they had little in common. The blonde had a triangular jaw and exuded masculinity. The brunette was closer to pretty than handsome. 

The woman between them made me feel breathless all over again. Or maybe that was the wolf crushing me. 

She had long, dark hair that curled lazily at the ends, black like a raven's feather that glowed with blue highlights. Half-lidded bedroom eyes, thick lashes that brushed her cheeks, and startlingly blue eyes fixed in a sweet heart-shape. Delicate bone structure, so she looked dainty and breakable, though I knew she was anything but. 

Her rouged lips curled into a fiendish little smile when she spied my position on the carpet of matted leaves. Her gaze flicked to John and Larry's futilely struggling forms for just a second, then settled back on me.

"You," Jeanette declared with infuriating smugness. "Are all dead."


	2. Chapter 2

"Let them up," she said after a moment of watching us all struggle. "Especially you, mon loup. Ma petite is no doubt losing circulation."

Her voice was light, the edges caressed with the laugh she wouldn't actually voice. She knew, after three years of stalking me and almost four months of consistent contact, that laughing in my face was a bad idea. I could see it in the sparkle that danced across the midnight blue of her eyes. She was smiling so hard I expected the deep dimple in one cheek to pop off like an overstretched button and go zinging through the trees. 

She'd won our bet without using vampire mind tricks or extraordinary measures. A proper date, no business this time. She'd been gracious enough to allow me to do the planning. It could be as casual as pizza at home or I could take her for a night on the town. I picked the dress code, the location, and the activity. She hadn't thrown sex into the wager. Hell, she hadn't even asked for a kiss at the end of the night. She seemed serious about her claims about consent. Or maybe, a cynical part of me whispered, she knew that pressing the issue was a surefire way to make me say no. She had been invading my privacy for years. 

The mirth in her eyes faded, the smile dimming as she processed my mood. And, damn it, now I hated that I was making her unhappy. This stupid fucking mark business was twisting me into knots. I wanted to hate her but I couldn't. Half of me was convinced that she revised my feelings for her every time we were in a room together but...somewhere deep down, I knew I was lying to myself. I was just as conflicted elsewhere. 

I almost told her to smile again, but didn't. Couldn't give the game away to her subordinates. Everyone but she and I were convinced these little training exercises were to make Jeanette's Kiss proof against hunters, and my select few trainees resistant to vampire and therian tricks. Jeanette's public second-in-command, Raina Wallis, was the lupa of the local werewolf pack. She'd finally agreed to test her wolves in these little games. She hadn't wanted to abide by the rules. No killing or even bloodshed, if it could be helped. My side sported tranqs and modified laser tag guns, like this was some big, deadly party game. Any vampire or wolf who took things too far would suffer Jeanette's wrath. I hadn't ever seen her punish a Kiss member, but I heard it could be gruesome and memorable. 

The wolf lifted its crushing weight from my legs and I groaned as feeling seeped slowly back into my much-abused lower body. In July, that move could have incapacitated me with pain. Earlier in the year, I'd been tortured by a sadistic vampire bent on revenge. He'd left one leg and part of my torso a quilt of partially healed burn scars. I'd been afraid that the injury might actually put me out of the game for good. 

A month later my legs had been brutalized again. Except, this time around, I'd been able to sleep in the arms of my vampire master, share in the advanced healing factor that came with her undead state. The new wounds had healed completely and the pain that came with the previous injury was gone. The outward appearance hadn't changed but something crucial had mended. I had more mobility. I didn't need a steady stream of painkillers any longer. I'd never look pretty, but I could do my job. 

When the doctor announced the optimistic prognosis I had damn near cried. 

The wolf took a few steps back so that it could stand near but not loom over me. Then it began to change. Slow, and not as pretty as some of the dancers I'd seen at Jeanette's strip club, Iniquity. Jason and Stephen, two werewolf dancers I'd briefly met in the interim, could make it look somehow artful, even as the ectoplasm slid across their skin, turning them into something new. I'd never personally found it sexy, but I had to admit, the skill and timing it took to do a swift shape change to music was incredible. The fact they didn't immediately pass out afterward? Even more so. 

The liquid ran clear and thick, rolling off the wolf's shoulders, spilling a new shape out. Think foal struggling to be free of its mother. Not a sexy picture. But the man pouring forth...wow. 

He had a shoulder-length sweep of ash brown hair, run through with lighter color. His face was composed of high, sweeping cheekbones, a very narrow nose, a nice, solid line of jaw. Not too heavy, not too pointy. That chiseled profile that was plastered onto male magazines. His skin was golden brown, like he spent his time outdoors, maybe lounging by the beach. I suspected it was natural. He looked like he might have a little Native American blood in him, though it was impossible to know for sure unless I asked. Seemed a little rude, but then again, he had just tackled me. It might make us even. 

I didn't ask. He might not even know. Grandma said most Americans were Heinz 57. A little bit of this and a little bit of that and no one could ever know for sure, because we didn't come with labels. 

I did my best to stop myself at the shoulders. Broad and well-muscled shoulders that gleamed as the ectoplasm slid smoothly off his skin...

I failed spectacularly. I darted a glance down the rest of his body and was not disappointed. Not by a single inch of it. 

My cheeks burned. Ogling strangers. That was stooping to a new low. Probably time to make a brave foray into the world of adult toys. Or just have a one night stand. I'd chicken out at the last second, as I always did. Call me crazy, but I believed you should love the person you slept with. Or at least like them a whole hell of a lot. I wasn't a 'Shake, stir, thank you, Sir,' sort of gal. 

But I needed to do something. Clearly this was getting ridiculous. 

He caught me looking and his full lips curled into the barest hint of a smile. 

"Maybe you should buy me dinner first," he murmured. His voice was husky, as though he still retained a bit of his wolf, even in this form. It made me shiver, which made him grin wider. 

"If you win the rematch I'll consider going dutch."

There was no sound to betray her. No outward indication that one could spy that would alert others to her irritation. But I felt it. A sizzling gush of emotion that evaporated just as quickly, like butter onto a heated pan. Anger, betrayal, seething jealousy, doubt, and then...nothing. Her shields were back up, the mask of aloof master vampire fixed in place. 

The message came through loud and clear, even if she'd never say it aloud to me. She didn't like the fact I'd extended the offer. 

"Set the tagalongs down," she instructed the two female vampires. "And Richard, find some clothing, will you? Ma petite is a lady."

The vampire sporting the ebony braid obeyed with only minimal hesitation, setting Larry on his feet. It wasn't gentle. He staggered and went down on his butt. Thankfully it was autumn, so the thick layer of leaves would probably keep him from bruising his tailbone. The Asian vampire's grip just seemed to grow tighter, like she was preparing to dig for John's spine. 

"Meng Die," Jeanette began warningly. 

Meng Die let out a soft, scornful sound and released John, shoving him backward deliberately, instead of simply releasing him as the first vampire had. His back hit a nearby tree so hard it knocked the breath from him. 

"Pathetic," she muttered. 

But she wasn't looking at him. She aimed the insult at me, shooting me one cool, contemptuous glance before exiting the scene with a sinuous roll of hips. 

"She pulls off bitch well doesn't she?" I asked no one in particular. "Really brings out the murder in her eyes."

Richard laughed, and by the time I turned back to face him, he was wearing a pair of cutoff shorts. I supposed I understood why it was Rafael's outfit of choice when we met. Easier to roll up and take with you than a three-piece suit. I enjoyed seeing Rafael out of his clothes too and he was probably the closest I'd come to considering casual sex but still...

It didn't seem right. Rafael deserved better than that. 

Jeanette gave a grudging chuckle and I felt some tight knot of tension loosen in her chest. 

"Come, ma petite. I believe you drove us here. You will have to be my ride home." 

I could have told her to shove it. It was still hours until dawn and at least a few of her Kiss members could fly. I didn't know whether she herself possessed the ability, but even if she was earthbound, she could still find her way there without me. I didn't argue, though every part of me wanted to. Our arrangement demanded I play nice, at least in public. I could ream her in the car if I felt so inclined, but while we were in front of members of the Kiss and visiting Masters, I had to toe a fine line. Arguing with her made her look weak. Weak and ineffectual Masters were usurped. It'd be like taking her out at the knees and expecting her to still be able to fight. I could put up with it, so long as my position didn't demand anything illegal or distasteful. So far, it hadn't.

I took her hand when she offered it, power crackling along my skin where our skin touched. Every time we brushed against each other now, it was electric. Almost literally. It felt like standing beneath a series of active power lines. It thrummed with ready, dangerous power. It'd been like this since August when I'd gotten my first glimpse of the creature the vampires called Marmee Noir. Something had awakened in me, and I was certain it wasn't a good thing. I slid my hand out of hers the second I was on my feet. 

"You didn't tell us there were going to be vampires!" Larry griped. "I thought it was just werewolves. This isn't fair. You knew this was our first hunt." 

"Vampire hunting isn't about fair, Larry," I snapped, irritation instant, springing to life like a match being struck. "There are no rules, no code of honor. You win or you die. Don't ever go into a hunt assuming you know what's going to happen." 

John didn't protest the unfairness of it all. He could be a prideful son of a bitch, but that pride would probably keep him from saying the sort of stupid shit Larry was now spewing. When appearance matters, you choose your words carefully. John had the right temperament to hunt vampires. I was still waiting to see if any of the lessons would penetrate. 

I strode away from the two men, still pissed, with Jeanette trailing closely behind. She'd regained some of her composure and seemed to find the whole thing funny again. I waited until we were almost halfway down the steep slope before I spoke.

"Go ahead and say I told you so." 

"Why would I do that, ma petite?" 

I could spy the Jeep parked below if I strained. It'd probably take us another five or six minutes to reach it if we kept up this steady clip. 

"You said your Kiss could, at least collectively, beat the Executioner. You were right. You weren't even using all your people. So go ahead and gloat. You're entitled." 

She sighed, long-suffering and loud like I was tap dancing on her last nerve. I'd heard that sound from Judith a lot. It did nothing to improve my mood. 

"You were weighed down with two men who have never interacted with a real vampire or therian before. You have beaten or drawn with us when unaccompanied. Mr. Burke has only staked vampires who were dead for the day. Mr. Kirkland has only seen pictures of therians during the course of gaining his preternatural biology degree. They were both nervous and needed assurance. It was hardly fair. If you hadn't given your troll hounds orders not to attack..." 

"I didn't want them getting hurt or killed. You know Meng Die would have considered that provocation for 'necessary violence.'" 

She sighed again. "Oui. It was wise. This time does not have to count." 

"You won fair and square. I'll come up with something to do this weekend."

I caught a fleeting frown before she had time to clear the expression. 

"Is it truly such a chore?" 

"No, that's not it, I..." I pinched the bridge of my nose. "It's not that." 

"And yet, you accept Mr. Zeeman's proposal so casually..." she continued as if she hadn't even heard me. 

"It was a joke. I teased him back." 

"You smelled of truth." 

I ground my teeth. Fucking vampires. It made interpersonal shit harder than it needed to be. Hormone fluctuations, sweat, pupil dilation, and heart rate could all indicate a lie. You couldn't even lie to spare someone's feelings around these people. 

"He's hot, okay? I haven't had a hot, naked man in proximity for a long time. It's nice to flirt and...Good God, have you seen that thing? I didn't think of myself as a size queen but...wow."

Jeanette inclined her head, conceding the point. "Mr. Zeeman is very proportionate." 

That was one word for it. 

"Have you fucked him?" I asked. 

Her steps faltered for just a moment and she choked on a laugh. 

"Pardon?" 

"Are you two involved? Was that why you were pissed? I may be an abject failure at most things girl, but I know that rule at least. Don't steal another girl's man."

"Blind," she muttered. "I've decided. It's not pigheadedness or stupidity. You just will not open your eyes if the truth is uncomfortable, will you?"

"Is he yours?" 

"I have never fucked him. Raina offers her wolves to me, hoping I will choose one as a regular blood donor. Anyone interested in the position is volunteering for these exercises. They are intrigued by you, more than interested in me, I think." 

I wasn't sure what to say to that, so asked the only question I could think of, in light of her answer. 

"You do like men, right? I know you've slept with them when you were human and a young vampire but..."

Her consent had been dubious at best. Jeanette had been a scullery maid turned mistress before being turned. She'd been doing what she had to do to survive for far longer than I could contemplate. This might be the first prolonged stretch of freedom she'd ever experienced. I couldn't blame her for reveling in it. 

"I have had three great loves in my life. Two men and one woman." 

Nope, this topic was no less uncomfortable. 

"It still counts," I said, trying to salvage this conversation before it became a talk about _feelings_. "I'll take you to dinner. Wait...you can't taste anything. Damn..." 

"I can taste through you, ma petite, if you allow the connection to remain open. You are rarely unguarded, so I have only tried once when Nikolaos trapped me in a cross-wrapped coffin. Even then, you were eating so little I barely perceived anything. But if you would be willing, I could at least pretend I am eating."

That threw me. "I didn't know that vampires could do that." 

"We are physical and psychic parasites, ma petite. Does it shock you that we can siphon off the energy of those we are connected to?" 

"No," I admitted. "Not really. It's just surprising. Anything you're dying to try?" 

"Whatever you would like, ma petite. you will be the one eating after all." 

We were silent again, and above I could hear Larry and John starting to make their descent. Jeanette turned toward them a fraction, her lovely face thoughtful. 

"You were harsh with Mr. Kirkland." 

"Good. He needs a few harsh lessons if he wants to survive. I send either of them out to face the monsters right now and I'll have to turn myself in for negligent homicide." 

"Still. It seems like casting them into the deep end of a pool and shouting at them to swim." 

I let out a low, bitter chuckle. "Hardly. I'm handling them with kid gloves, Jeanette. Do you know what Edward did to me on my first hunt?" 

We reached the bottom of the slope and followed the barely-there path that led back to a small parking area. The asphalt was cracked and sprouting leafy green stalks like feathery green hair. The weeds would die off in the next frost and winter weather would expand the cracks in the pavement. It'd look worse comes spring. Not my problem. I was hoping to be done with this neck of the woods by the time next spring rolled around. 

"I hesitate to ask." 

I crossed over to the Jeep, unlocking it as I went, yanking the driver's side door open when I reached it. 

"He told me I'd be doing a simulation in the Ozarks, not unlike the one I arranged for John and Larry tonight. There are a few vampires and weres he trusts enough to contract for special jobs. He said he'd call them in. I'd go in with tranqs, frangible rounds, and holy water. I could send up a flare if I got overwhelmed and the exercise would be over. I just wouldn't cut it as his student, that was that." 

I slid into the seat and reached into the backseat for the twelve-pack of Coke I'd bought yesterday. I cracked one open, downed half the contents before I finished the story. It still pissed me off to this day. 

"He lied. He'd captured his last three targets, instead of killing them. Two vampires and a wereleopard. He gave them the hotel pillow I'd slept on the night before so they could get my scent. He told them the one who killed me could walk away with his life before releasing them into the state park where I'd be waiting. He sent some of the most dangerous monsters on the planet after me and I had no fucking idea. Worse? None of the weapons worked. The tranqs were filled with sugar water, the holy water hadn't been blessed, and the Browning he'd given me was sabotaged." 

Jeanette had slid into the passenger's seat beside me. I dared a peek at her face. Her eyes were huge in her face, mouth agape in horror, her skin somehow looking paler. Rice paper, rather than polished ivory. 

"How did you...?" She looked me over, and the expression was equal parts wonder and bewilderment. 

"I avoided being killed by sheer dumb luck. When I discovered I was being hunted, I found a Red Deer carcass that had been abandoned in the woods. It was out of season and someone tried to hide the fact they'd made the buck a trophy kill. Red Deer can grow to be seven feet long and four hundred pounds at the high end. The corpse was out of the way, so I used the one knife I had on me to cut it open I slipped inside the carcass and stewed in the putrefying organs until they passed. Then I doubled back to find a stream. I swam with the current until I found a cabin tucked into the woods. I raided it and, after some searching, found a handgun and a compound bow. You can probably guess what I did with them." 

She had no easy comeback. I thought she might be gobsmacked for the first time in a couple of centuries. Finally, she managed;

"Death wants you, Anita. For years, I watched your interactions from afar." 

"He was trying to teach me the three cardinal rules. I learned them." 

She raised a thin, skeptical brow as I put the Jeep in drive. "And those are?" 

I held up three fingers and began ticking down.

"Number three. Don't ever assume. No matter what you do, no matter how well you prepare, there will always be something you don't account for. Carrying an arsenal on your person doesn't make you any less dead if you go swaggering around like an arrogant little shit, thinking you know everything. I thought I knew how to hunt vampires. I didn't. Number two, preparation is necessary to hunt monsters, but flexibility is more important. Creative hunters live longer." 

"And number one?" 

I met her gaze very solidly simply because I could. For many years it was instinct to drop my eyes in the presence of a vampire. It always felt like kowtowing. I was grateful I didn't have to do it any longer. 

"Your friends aren't always your friends on a vampire hunt. All it takes is a glance for your buddy to turn a gun on you, instead of the monster. Then you're dead and he's a snack. Don't trust the guy next to you any more than you trust the monster." 

I had to look away when we reached the main road. I was pretty sure I'd upset her. Still, her voice came out even when she said; 

"I sensed a new vampire entering my territory yesterday evening. He or she is powerful. A master vampire, at the very least, and they are not observing the social niceties. If they make trouble, can I count on your expertise to handle the situation, ma petite? Their intentions do not feel benign." 

"If he crosses the line, his ass is grass. Count on it." 

Her smile returned, a little wry, but genuine.

"It is always 'make war, not love' with you, ma petite. You are a nightmare to seduce."

"Because I know there's a catch. Hard to con a person when they know it's coming." 

"Aveugle. Elle est incroyablement aveugle..." 

She muttered in French the entire way to the Circus of the Damned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have changed the ectoplasm's consistency because sporkers I have read have drawn comparisons to bukake and now I can never un-think that. Also, it's routinely the excuse for pointless shower sex scenes or to put Anita in a situation where she has to be humiliated by nudity (hers or someone else's, it doesn't matter. It seems like it's one of the author's kinks.) So in this fic, it's just mucus-like.


	3. Chapter 3

"This court finds in favor of the plaintiff. Eden Davis will be awarded damages in the order of seventy-five thousand dollars and the return of her property. So ordered." 

The gavel struck the block, the sound like the report of a .22 in the relative stillness of the courtroom. I stared blankly up at the judge's bench, curious numbness settling over me. It took half a minute for the judge's meaning to penetrate. He stared back, his bushy brows lifted in expectation. Maybe he'd expected me to shout. I _did_ have a reputation for defying authority after all. But all I could think, as he gathered himself and prepared to retreat back into his chambers, was how much the eyebrows resembled Brillo pads. 

"Anita, honey, the case is over. We have to go." 

I turned my head a fraction to look at her. Monica Vespucci was an attractive woman, taller than I was, and in good shape. She'd fallen behind on her tanning regimen of late. She looked a little washed out, and the spill of dark, dyed black hair didn't help matters. She looked faintly nauseous. Probably a combination of the unexpected case loss and the burgeoning baby bump that was beginning to strain her pantsuit. 

She'd called me honey like we were still chummy. I'd never liked Catherine's work friends, and I'd liked Monica even less when she'd maneuvered Catherine into a dangerous position, months back. Her vampire boyfriend was beholden to the then master, so she hadn't had much choice, but still...

"Anita," she whispered, placing gentle fingers just above my elbow. She tugged lightly at the amethyst silk blouse when that failed to get my attention. "The judge has made his verdict. We have to clear out." 

When I still didn't respond, she pinched me. It did successfully jerk me from my numb haze, launching me straight into fucking pissed. I yanked my arm free of her grasp and shoved my chair away from the counsel table, banging out into the aisle as swiftly as possible under the circumstances. The room was stuffy, and I scrabbled for the buttons of my blouse, popping three of them. It bared a generous portion of cleavage and I didn't care. I wasn't on call to impress anyone at the moment.

Ordinarily, the move would have spilled Curtis' blocky silver cross from beneath my shirt. But it wouldn't. Not ever again. 

Curtis had gifted me a cross before I began working at Animators Inc. Interaction with vampires was more common there, and he'd wanted me to be safe. I supposed I'd always assumed he'd bought it. He hadn't told me it had belonged to his maternal grandmother. He hadn't told his mother he'd taken it before trying to elope with me. So in the eyes of the law, he was a thief. The item was being held until the case could be decided. 

I'd never wear his cross again. Never be able to trace my fingers around the contours and remember what it felt like to have him pressed against my back, laughing as he fumbled with the clasp, trying to put the damn thing on. It was gone. 

Eden Davis had shimmied out from behind the plaintiff's table mere seconds after the verdict had been handed down. She swayed, long-legged, and confident toward the back of the room, casting a supercilious smile over one shoulder at me. Smug fairly dripped off of her. She'd wrapped her manicured fingers around the young, attractive lawyer's forearm like a vise, leaning into him as though she simply didn't have the strength to stand. She'd been hamming it up the entire session, sniffling into a Kleenex, ducking her head, shoulders shaking. The effort it took not to cackle maniacally must have hurt. 

Because I knew, just from that look, that this had nothing to do with Curtis. She hadn't been grief-stricken at his funeral, three years ago. She'd been furious. Furious that he'd tried to cut the apron strings, willing to be disowned rather than break his engagement to me. She'd promised never to speak to him if he married me, the backwoods, mixed-race, zombie-raising freak he'd met and dated in college. She'd tried to sue me just after his murder, but nothing could stick. Now she'd found a way to hit me where it hurt.

In July, Curtis had been raised by a rogue animator trying to fuck with my head. He'd taken part in a bloodthirsty rampage that had maimed seven before the night was over. I hadn't been convicted on abuse of a corpse charges or magical malfeasance. Still, the pictures of the attacks had circulated. Curtis had been recognized. It'd been enough. 

It wasn't the money that bothered me. Bert had people clamoring to hire me after news of what had happened on the Reynolds case had come to light. According to reports, I was equally as powerful as the foremost animator in America, able to raise a five-hundred-year-old corpse with only a bovine sacrifice. And unlike Dr. Georgia Hale, I was available for hire. I could make 75k in a month or two. The gouge stung, but it wouldn't bankrupt me. Losing the cross hurt more than words could express. It felt like the last, tangible piece of him I had left. 

My stomach was clenched so tight I wanted to join Monica as she sprinted for the ladies' room. Throwing up sounded like an excellent idea. So did screaming, or going for Eden's eyes. I stayed put, staring impotently after her with tears burning in my eyes. I couldn't blink, or they'd fall. If they fell, I'd sob. I would _not_ go to pieces until I had a private place to do it.

Eden Davis tossed one final smirk over her shoulder as the last of her little audience filtered out. My fingers groped along the pencil skirt I wore, trying in vain to find my sidearm. I'd never wanted to shoot a human being more than I wanted to shoot her at that moment. I killed monsters. I tried not to hurt or kill humans unless they were trying to kill me first, and even then, I didn't like it. I fancied I could have shot Eden without blinking or even feeling bad about it. 

Monsters came in all shapes and sizes. I was beginning to learn that not all of them had claws or fangs. Some of them wear human faces.

By the time I gathered myself, washed away the evidence of the few tears I'd accidentally shed on the way to the bathroom, and made my way downstairs, the street lights had flickered on. The 22nd judicial circuit court had been forced to extend its hours after Addison v. Clark had ruled vampires legally alive. Technically, vampires had been integrating with humans since Roosevelt had been in office. They'd been legally allowed to own land, interact with humans in a non-violent manner, and generally exist out in the open. It'd looked great on paper. In reality, it hadn't meant shit. Humans have difficulty treating each other with respect and decency. Fat chance they'd put up with literal monsters if there were no legal repercussions to stop them. 

Bria Addison had been a senior in high school when she'd been attacked, turned, and subsequently ostracized from her hometown of Loveland, Tennessee. Stunned by the unfairness of life on the other side, she'd searched for the only human rights lawyer in the state willing to take the case and filed against Mayor Francis Clark.

It wasn't the first time a monster had sued for the right to be human, but Bria Addison had been the first to do it successfully. Young, white, middle-class, and turned against her will. It'd been just the right combination to turn a key and open Pandora's box. Vampires were legal everywhere now, for good or ill. Police had been forced to take on the brunt of supernatural crime without extra training or manpower. The bounty hunters who'd dealt with the monsters before the change had to be licensed and issued warrants, or killing a vampire was murder. Vampires had their day in court if they could be proven non-violent. 

This meant that courtrooms were pretty much 24/7 depots of activity these days. Convenient for an animator. Much like a vampire, my best work was done after dark. I had a raising in Bellefontaine Cemetery in three hours, not too far away from where Curtis had been buried. Maybe I'd drop by Curtis' grave to tell him what a bitch his mother was. 

Of course, she'd probably be expecting that.

There were three people waiting for me in the lobby when I finally reached the ground floor. Monica, who'd returned from the bathroom, leaned into the side of the tall, blonde who'd accompanied Jeanette on the fake vampire hunt in the woods. Robert, I thought he was called. He seemed too pretty to be a Bob. But hey, I seemed a little young to be an Anita. Most people I met that shared my name tended to be older. 

"You look like death," he teased, pressing the back of one pale, long-fingered hand to Monica's forehead. 

"This little vampire is sucking the life out of me," Monica griped, rubbing her belly gently. 

"Can you blame him? You're so tasty." 

Monica's amniocentesis had come back negative for Vlad's Syndrome, the most common birth defect in "dhampirs" the somewhat derogatory term for a mixed-species baby. The test had also revealed she was carrying a little boy. 

She chuckled and leaned up to give him a kiss. "Take me home, baby. I'm beat." 

I ignored the saccharine exchange in favor of staring down the new arrival. She was doing her best not to be flashy, but it was difficult when you were as stupid pretty as Jeanette Davenay. Even in casual clothes, she stood out. The white t-shirt and denim jeans and jacket made her look like the pre-makeover scene in a 90s movie. Which meant she was still stunning, just bare-faced and wearing sneakers. The effortless beauty pissed me off all the more, as my anger finally settled on a safe target. 

"What are you doing here?" I hissed. "Don't you have a club to run or a victim to drain dry?" 

As per usual, she didn't react to the jab. Charm oozed off of her, and her pageant winning smile was so white it could have blinded an unwary passerby. 

"Are you volunteering, ma petite?" 

"Oh fuck off." 

I was technically in breach of our agreement to play nice in front of the flunkies. I didn't really care. I wanted to go home, sob in the shower, medicate with chocolate, and then go to work. I could take my frustrations out on the punching bag later if I hadn't exhausted myself. Four corpses tonight, all of them two centuries old. It was going to be an interesting night.

"We lost the case," Monica said faintly. I wasn't sure if she was informing Robert or Jeanette. The conversational tone was the same. Was she really in so tight with the Master of the City that she felt comfortable enough to talk like they were best pals? "To the tune of seventy-five grand."

"What happened to attorney-client privilege?" I snapped. 

Jeanette would probably have found out through her own channels. At my insistence, she'd stopped stalking me constantly. She still kept an unnervingly close eye on me, though. She'd stationed a werewolf bodyguard in my building, assuming correctly I wouldn't move to the daytime resting place of the Saint Louis Kiss after she'd marked me. She knew who my friends where and where they went. She'd bought them all designer dresses after a flub on my part had gotten their fittings canceled only a week or two before Catherine's wedding. All in all, it had been creepy as fuck and I was glad she was backing off. 

"I am sorry ma petite," she began. "I came to see if I could-"

Someting inside me snapped. Two long strides and I'd reached her side. I seized her wrist and yanked her toward the door before she could finish the sentence. It took her a second to recover her balance. She poised on the balls of her feet, even in sneakers, unused to being flat-footed after literal decades of wearing heels. She didn't fight to free her grip from mine as I pulled her toward the exit. The guard gave me a suspicious sidelong glance when we marched through it, but didn't say anything. 

I released her when I found a nice, private stretch of sidewalk. 

"Stop," I hissed. "Stop doing this." 

"Doing what?" she asked, a small, half-pout forming on her full lips. 

"Stop trying to do things for me. Stop trying to swoop in and save me. I don't need the money. I'm not your girlfriend, Jeanette. I am not a damsel in distress. I don't need a vampire trying to be my white knight. I can rescue myself. Stop treating me like a fucking child." 

Lines formed around Jeanette's eyes when they narrowed. Her mouth mashed into a pale, angry line. 

"I came to offer support and a gift," she said, tone clipped. 

She reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and withdrew a velvet jewelry box. She flicked it open with her thumb, revealing a glinting metal shape within. A medium-sized crucifix with Florette tips. I could tell, without consulting a historian, that it was several centuries old, simply by the craftsmanship. It was well-worn. 

"What is this?" 

"A gift, given to me by one of the lords I served. Nicolas, the kinder of the two. He gifted it to me on my twenty-fourth birthday. I cannot use it, so I wished to pass it on to you, in the unfortunate event you lost your own."

The October air felt cold on my exposed chest. My throat closed up tight and the tears began to burn in my eyes again. Damn it. 

"Why give me a cross? What if I turned it on you?" 

"I want you to be proof against all vampires, Anita. Even myself. If you don't want it, I will return it to my collection. I thought I'd make the offer."

I opened my mouth, casting around for a response. What the hell did I say to something like that? It was a very raw reminder that Jeanette's feelings for me, healthy or not, ran deep. I hadn't even begun to dip a toe into that particular drowning pool. The water was dangerous and I had a good chance of being sucked under if I climbed in.

"Jeanette, I..." 

I'd never know what I would have said or done next. Because, without warning, Jeanette's body jerked, a chunk the size of a quarter punching outward from her chest. I had a frozen millisecond to see the crimson stain spread across her white t-shirt. Then the burning began in my bicep. A graze. I barely managed to scoop her up as she began to pitch forward. Blood, warm and thick, seeped into the front of my blouse. 

Someone was shooting at us.


	4. Chapter 4

The next shot missed us by inches, shattering a window in the courtroom's ground floor. I prayed that whoever ordinarily used it had decided to take a bathroom break. The alternative was too depressing to think about, with Jeanette already dead or dying in my arms. 

Jeanette, dead. The thought made me feel cold in a way the October chill never could. She'd technically been dead for centuries but gone? No. That was just...wrong. I didn't think it was the marks she'd placed on me that made me feel that way, either. If someone was going to kill her, it ought to be someone of some note, not some amateur looking to make the news. 

And this had to be an amateur hunter. Vampires were tough customers. Any seasoned assassin would have known to set up in one of the surrounding buildings and take Jeanette out with a headshot. You could miss or not entirely obliterate the heart if you aimed center of mass. A solid headshot would kill just about anything. 

Another shot spurred me into motion. It shattered another window, higher up this time, the glass plinking to the pavement in a glittering rain. I got a better grip on Jeanette and dragged her to the nearest shelter available; a newly planted maple. Jeanette looked like a waif and, truthfully, she was. Celebrity sites slavishly compiled every detail they could about her, so I knew she was only a hundred and eight pounds. It looked nearly skeletal on her 5'8" frame. Still, a hundred and eight pounds of dead weight felt like a hell of a lot on an injured arm, especially when I was forced to move fast.

The trunk of the tree was slender and wasn't ideal cover. Still, the red and orange leaves had yet to fall and that would lower the shooter's visibility. Unfortunately, it lowered mine as well. I couldn't spy the shooter, even when I dared to peek around the tree trunk. 

Damn Eden Davis. Someone ought really ought to jam a crowbar into her chest and pry her open, just to marvel at the dusty space where a soul used to reside. If not for her, we wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be mostly unarmed, as per security's request, and I wouldn't be left defenseless while someone I cared about died in my arms. Again. 

I slid down the trunk a little, bark ripping holes in my newest silk blouse. It sort of pissed me off, even though the fabric would probably be ruined anyway. Blood was hard to get out when it set. I hadn't thought a trip to the courthouse would result in a bloodbath. Silly me. 

I shoved a hand into my pocket and groped for my phone. Thank God I'd begun using the fingerprint ID because my fingers were shaking too badly to punch in my passcode. Jeanette wasn't breathing or moving. Searching for a pulse in her neck wouldn't help me determine if she was still undead. Vampires breathed only out of habit or to speak. They didn't have heartbeats unless they forced the issue. The heart was a muscle and really old vampires could have the power to force it to flex. A defense mechanism they'd developed against hunters. There was just no way to tell the difference between unconscious and dead. 

"Unconscious," I whispered. "Please just be unconscious."

Claudia's number was in my frequent calls list. Since Ronnie had all but dropped out of my life, intent on jailing my mentor, Claudia had become my running partner, gym buddy, and monthly movie and pizza pal. I still didn't quite trust her with personal stuff, knowing how close she was to the center of power, but I trusted her to have my back in a dicey situation. She had to be somewhere close. Jeanette always had a security detail. At the very least one of her people could get us out of the kill zone before Mr. Potshot got lucky. 

Another shot punched into a nearby trashcan. Shit, why couldn't I hear the report of the gun? He had to be using a military-grade supressor to remain so silent. A J. Bradshaw maybe. Justus Bradshaw had been designing for the U.S. Military since his brother had been killed by werehyena insurgents during the Gulf War. It was specially designed for sniping vampire and therians. Jeanette would have heard a regular shot coming. They were expensive and incredibly difficult to acquire even through black market sales. 

None of this made sense. A shooter with military or black market connections should have been savvy enough to shoot Jeanette in the head. What the fuck was going on here? 

My fingers drummed impatiently on the phone's case. The phone rang only once. Claudia was prompt like that. Another reason I liked her. She didn't even bother with a hello. Another point for her.

"Anita, what's wrong? Is the Master-" 

"Shot. The fucker is using a military grade supressor, so I doubt even a therian can hear the shots over the ambient city noise. I've been grazed, but I'm alright. We're sheltering behind a maple on the right side of the courthouse. I'm unarmed and can't return fire. Is there any chance that you could send a van to pick us up?" 

I felt like shit, abandoning Monica and every other human in the courthouse at this hour, but what choice did I have? It would be more dangerous for us to duck inside the building. The shooter was after Jeanette. I'd only endanger more lives by dragging her inside, and first responders weren't obligated to respond to reports of an injured therian or vampire. It was at the discretion of any ambulance or police that wanted to risk it. I wasn't going to bet on those odds. Cherry said there were clinics in town designed for this sort of thing and that she was taking classes to become a nurse practitioner so she could work in one. Claudia would know where to go. 

Claudia paused for one beat. "Is she...?" 

"I don't know! Send help, now!" 

"There's a van a few blocks up. I'll signal them. Hold on for a few more minutes, Anita." 

Then the line clicked and she was gone.

A few minutes. That would have seemed like nothing at all, under ordinary circumstances. In a gunfight, it was an eternity. 

I slid to the base of the trunk, Jeanette folding like a rag doll in my arms. The wound looked even worse from this vantage point. Maybe an inch too high to have scored a direct hit to her heart. Her face was slack and completely bloodless. She really did look like a very well-preserved corpse. What she should have looked like in 1432 when she'd allegedly died. 

I could finish the job the gunman started. It wouldn't even be hard to do, given the handy opening. Find a thick enough branch on the maple and shove a stake through her heart. It would make my life a lot simpler if she died. No more vampire politics. No more cat and mouse games. No more climbing into bed with the monsters. 

But...if she died, I could die too. Even assuming I didn't, it would leave Meng-Die the vampire in charge. She'd made it very clear how she felt about me. I wouldn't be any safer. Jeanette wanted to fuck me. Meng-Die wanted my kidneys carved out, fried up, and served with onions. 

Better the devil you know, than the one you didn't. 

I reached toward my back and the only emergency weapon I had on my person. It was useless against the shooter but it might just save Jeanette's life. A lot of courthouses still used the Rapiscan Secure models, even though they'd been proven ridiculously easy to dupe. Teflon tape could be used to secure small weapons to the base of the spine without setting off the detector. The blade I had at my back belonged in one of my wrist sheaths. 

My bicep sent up a loud, insistent complaint when I strained to free the knife from its place at the small of my back. I actually cursed aloud when the tape jerked off my bare skin. That might make me think twice before trying this trick again. It hurt like a son of a bitch. 

The knife clattered free, and I leaned away from Jeannette to retrieve it. Her head lolled off the side of my knees. She was beginning to look a little gray. 

"Please, God, let this work," I breathed. 

I wasn't sure if God was taking requests today. If he was, he might find this one too repugnant for his taste. I couldn't blame him for that. 

The blade sliced cleanly through my forearm, a quick, shallow cut that wouldn't sever any arteries. I hoped. Blood welled immediately, running in a hot, thick line down the pale skin of my arm. It was awkward to guide her mouth to the cut and keep it there. To my knowledge, no one had tried to do this little ritual ass-backward, the way I was about to. Malcolm hadn't mentioned anything about a servant initiating anything. The words were almost familiar, a bastardized version of what I'd learned in high school lit. It had apparently been based in fact, somewhere down the line. 

"And I, their best beloved one, am now to you. A companion and helper, a faithful servant to my master."

The words tasted sour. I was no one's servant. Still, I couldn't tell her exactly what she was to her face if she didn't live. 

For seconds that seemed longer, nothing happened. She didn't move. Blood ran in thin lines out of her mouth, pooling in the collar of her denim jacket. Then Jeanette came alive, spluttering like she'd surfaced from deep water. She flailed, trying to push me away at first. I understood that confusion. I'd clocked Edward after waking to find him looming just above me. In those confused moments, when you were hurting and scared, everything looked like a threat. 

Then she seemed to realize what I'd done and her hands flew up to lock around my wrist and elbow, holding the wound firmly to her mouth. Her tongue was slippery and almost ticklish as she tried to lap up every drop she could find. The soft, distressed sound she made when she found no more might have been cute, in any other circumstance. Like a kid who realized they'd eaten their entire Halloween haul in one go. Except that Jeanette could gouge more candy out of me if she really wanted it. 

Her fangs sank deep, digging into my forearm like superheated needles, tearing fresh furrows into my flesh. 

"Motherfucker!" I hissed. 

Vampire bites could be damn near orgasmic if you were under thrall. Awake, aware, and scared? It just felt like getting stabbed. 

She drank in long pulls, swallowing greedily, bowing my body over hers in an attempt to get me as close as possible. The tips of my fingers were purpling, pins and needles running the length of my arm. Her grip was too tight. I couldn't free myself, even though I'd tried to wrench my arm away the second she'd bitten down. 

Dizziness crashed over me in waves, nausea clawing at the back of my throat. Faint ringing began in my ears. How much had she taken? 

"Stop," I croaked. "Jeanette, you have to stop. You'll kill me." 

The words didn't penetrate. If anything, she seemed to suck harder, guzzling blood like she'd run a marathon in the middle of a blazing August evening. Could she hear anything past the gush of blood and the furious hammering of my heart?

I hadn't felt anything pass between us. I wasn't even sure I was capable of forging the third mark between us. But I'd been focused on the last few shots, which had gone wide and hit pavement or glass. The sidewalk was a wasteland of glittering shards. Sirens wailed in the distance. Somewhere, not far away, Claudia's people were riding to our rescue. If I didn't pry Jeanette loose, there'd be no one to save. Calling to her mentally was worth a shot. Worst case scenario I was dead and wrong. 

I gave Jeanette a mental shove. _"Hey, Elvira, knock it off! Can't exactly fuck me if I'm dead, can you?"_

Jeanette jerked hard, like she'd been shot once again, and her grip fell away from me. I crawled out from under her quickly, not feeling even a twinge of guilt when her head smacked the pavement. I retched, almost bringing up the coffee I'd had earlier. The world swam in streams of color. Blood loss was a bitch. 

"Ma petite..." she whispered, voice equal parts horror and awe. I couldn't look at her face for long. Not while my blood smeared her mouth like viscous lipstick.

There was a chorus of car horns nearby. I leaned around the tree, forcing back vomit, as a nondescript van slammed to a stop in the middle of the slow lane and disgorged three men and one woman. Claudia was easily recognizable, standing head and shoulders over most of her crew. The only one taller was the well-muscled werewolf I'd met on the hunt. Richard. 

When I glanced back, Jeanette's eyes had fluttered closed again, but she was at least breathing. Tears pricked in my eyes as I watched the subtle rise and fall of her chest. I choked on an irrational sob. 

Claudia and her men scooped Jeanette from the pavement seconds after reaching us, whisking her away to the van like there were wings on their shoes. It left Richard to help me to my feet. Black spots danced across my vision and I leaned into his chest for balance. I was going to pass out again. Damn it. 

"I'm a were-goat," I griped. A were-fainting-goat. Fucking hell. 

"What?" Richard asked with an incredulous chuckle. 

I didn't get a chance to explain before I spiraled down into blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dark_Dhampir helpfully pointed out that I misunderstood how silencers work. I'm not a gun nut and I am doing this in my spare time so the research won't always be accurate. (I am trying though, promise.) If you spy something I can fix easily go ahead and tell me in the comments and I'll do my best to correct it! :) In this case, I went with the suggestion that since this is a world where the supernatural has always existed and they have recently started interacting with humans in a big way, that this was developed to take out vampires and therians from a distance without them being the wiser.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading and commenting. You guts are great. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Allusions to abuse, rape, and the deaths of children.

Consciousness came and went, like a wave lapping the shore. I caught vague snippets, so gauzy and unreal that they melded with dreams. 

Sterile white walls reflected light so blindingly bright it washed out the rest of the room. Only two shapes seemed real, seemingly suspended in mid-air, moving together in sensual ripples of flesh. Jeanette, bare but for black lace panties, had twined her slender legs around Richard's waist, her hips moving in eager little rolls. I couldn't tell if he was getting off on that or not. The dark spill of her hair obscured most of his face. Her mouth moved steadily against his throat, drawing blood out with almost indecent sounds of glee. 

He was mostly naked as well, and his hands gripped the small of her back. The contrast was striking. Warm, golden skin against her death-pale complexion. It looked like he was trying to hold off a particularly amorous ghost.

Jealousy twisted like a knife between my ribs. The question was, who was I jealous of? Him or her?

There was no chance to puzzle it out. The image was gone as quickly as it had come. When I blinked again, squares of equally white light flashed above me. A bag of O negative bobbed above me on an IV stand, like a rose caught in a blizzard. I blinked, and it was gone too. 

Someone brushed soft, gloved hands against my throat and a weight settled against my collarbone. I was too tired to work out what it might be. It didn't hurt, and that was all that mattered. Hushed voices carried out an argument just above me. One voice female, the other male, both familiar.

"She didn't accept that, from what I hear. She might be angry with you," Richard warned.

"If she'd accepted it, she could have kept me at bay. It is better that she have it. If you are truly concerned, gift her one as well, mon loup. For now, I will do what I can for her," Jeanette said. 

I tried to batter my way back to consciousness and lost the battle. My eyelids slammed closed again and I drifted. 

Memories flickered before my eyes like someone was turning the pages of an old photo album too quickly. I could only catch one out of every dozen or so. The ones that stood out were vivid and saturated with emotion. 

_A gaunt, dead-eyed woman stretched out on a dirt floor, with only a small pile of straw to serve as a pillow. She had Jeanette's dark hair, but she seemed comparatively plain. Her eyes were a cloudy gray, not blue. A pair of girls, perhaps only six and eight were curled into her side. The wind howled outside and I shivered._

Jeanette's thoughts whispered through my head, as though they were my own. 

_It was impossible to tell on these nights if the loup-garou were circling the village again. I kept my eyes trained on the door as the others struggled to sleep, a kitchen knife clutched in one hand. Standing guard so that mother could try to rest._

_No one slept that night._

The scene shifted. 

_A lavish bed-chamber. The soft fabrics felt foreign against my bare back. I'd never been in a bed so large before. I'm cold, despite the fire crackling in the grate, My stomach knotted as the Lord approached the bed, tugging at his pourpoint. I closed my eyes and could just make out the rustling sounds of his undressing._

_"Stay quiet," he warned me before his weight settled above me._

Time flashed forward. 

_Another man. Another bed. A hand clasping my rounded belly. A small smile curved my lips as Honnorée's kicked petulantly at her father's hand. A wise woman in town believed I carried a girl. I believed her. Nicolas chuckled._

_"Spirited, just like her mother."_

It continued on fast forward. Birth. Nursing, not one, but two babes at my breast. Twins. Nicolas had been overjoyed. Symonne far less so. The bastard children were his first, as his true wife had long been unable to conceive.

Then...

_Honnorée and Raoul lay very still on the bed linens, where their tearful nursemaid had lain them this morning. Stiff and ashy gray, they don't seem real. Like someone had fashioned these shapes from pale clay and spirited my real babies away. Raoul's arms were still extended above his head, the way he preferred to sleep. Nicolas attempted to fold them down and something snapped. That was when he'd begun wailing. He was still wailing, somewhere in the distance, interspersed with curses and demands that the nursemaid be flogged. As if she could have stopped cot death from claiming them in the night._

_I extended a trembling finger to trace the round swell of Honnorée's cheek. The skin was cold and didn't give. Her eyelids didn't flutter. My tears finally spilled over, running in rivulets, trembling on my chin before dripping onto her pale cheek._

_A knock on the door wrenched my gaze from my daughter's frozen face. The gravedigger's son, Julian, kept his head bowed, allowing me my dignity by not offering a handkerchief or offering me meaningless comfort. He had always known death. Rumors said he could speak to spirits and make dead animals stir, though most are too frightened of him to actually say the word 'witch.' I knew him as a child. Loved him in my own, childish way. I didn't find him frightening._

_"I...I need to take the bodies, ma'am," he mumbled. "On the Lady's orders."_

_He folded the linens over the tiny shapes and gathered them gingerly into his arms, carrying them like they were precious. At that moment, I thought I might love him still._

When I finally cracked my eyes open, I found myself staring at a drop ceiling made up of pockmarked tiles of the sort I'd seen often in hospitals. The recessed lights flickered temperamentally and a fly buzzed lazily to rest on the hard plastic cover. 

An experimental tug on my unscarred arm confirmed it. Something in the crook of my elbow pinched as the tubes strained to stay connected to the IV stand. For a muddled second, I wasn't entirely sure how I'd landed myself in the hospital again. Then the memories pelted me, rabbit punches of sound, sight, and feeling. We'd been attacked. Jeanette had tried to drain me. 

I sat up straighter and the machines beeped a warning. In my periphery, I watched shapes approached the bed. Craning my neck to look at them made me a little nauseous. There were three shapes, two of which I recognized. Richard, now fully dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a cheesy Halloween sweater vest. He'd tied his long hair back into a tail, which only served to highlight just how sharp his features were. In my compromised state, it was a struggle not to let slip something embarrassing like, "yummy" or "scrumdiddlyumptious."

I really didn't need to stroke his ego. Or...other things.

Beside him stood Cherry. She looked diminutive next to him, though they almost looked like they belonged together. Cherry had probably done a jig when Halloween time rolled around, allowing her to dip into the more extravagant elements of her goth wardrobe. The plum dress had a medium-length poofy skirt patterned with spiderwebs. The top was designed like a corset, lifting her perky breasts to almost touch her chin. The black tights, witchy heels, and a black overcoat kept her from freezing to death when the chill of the October evenings descended. It probably shouldn't have been shocking to see her here. She was using the money she earned working for Jeanette to pursue more medical training. Eventually, she wanted to work full-time at the newest clinic that had opened in Saint Louis as a nurse practitioner. That must be where I'd landed, given that every person in the room was giving off warm, pulsing, therian energy. 

"Thank God you're awake," Cherry breathed. "Everyone was really worried. Especially the Master."

"Gee, I'm touched," I muttered. My voice was thick and raspy like I'd gone for a long time without speaking. "It'd be more believable if she were, you know, _here._ " 

"She pushed herself to her limits, Ms. Blake," a woman said, drawing my attention to the unfamiliar shape at the fringes of the group.

She was probably the oldest person in the room, but she moved with a surety of purpose that made her seem younger. She looked to be in her mid-fifties and her hair was a half and half mix of salt and pepper. She hadn't died it to hide the white showing through. It conveyed a sense of security about herself that I liked. She bumped Richard aside with a hip and he let her do it, taking a graceful step back from the bed so she could lean over me. 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean the Master only turned in five minutes ago. Dawn is upon us. She'll be furious you woke just after she died for the day. I'm Dr. Lilian by the way." 

I probably ought to have said something polite but all I could think to say was; 

"Dawn?" It had been early evening when I'd passed out. That meant I'd been asleep for at least twelve hours, if not more. "Fuck! Bert is going to go ape shit!" 

I'd missed four high-profile raisings. Bert was going to kill me and display the taxidermied corpse in one of his lakeside homes with a placard that read _Homo Moronus._

Dr. Lilian slapped at my hands when I tried to jerk the IV out of the crook of my elbow. "Don't! You've lost too much blood as it is. Your work has been smoothed over." 

"Just like that, huh?" I asked, and couldn't keep the sneering tone out of my voice. 

I regretted the sass instantly when Dr. Lilian fixed me with a sharp, knowing stare. Though Dr. Lillian was younger than Grandma Blake, she seemed to possess the same ability to cut through bullshit with just one glance. 

"Several bystanders recorded the assassination attempt. It's gotten sixteen million hits in the last twelve hours. You're being hailed as a Good Samaritan, Blake. We've been swarmed by reporters asking after you. I believe that your employer has already given a glowing character reference to the Post-Dispatch."

I thumped my head onto the thin hospital pillow with a groan. Great. Just fucking great. Nothing to undercut your credibility as the Executioner like saving a dying vampire. I was already wearing Dolph's goodwill short. This stunt was sure to make me persona non grata in law enforcement and vampire hunting circles. Why hadn't I let her die? I wouldn't have been at fault. I hadn't been the one to shoot her. Just claim the first hit had been fatal and move on with my life. Simple. 

It hadn't seemed that way at the time.

Something shifted between my breasts and I glanced down to find an antique crucifix resting in the line of my cleavage. Jeanette's cross. Someone had fastened it around my neck while I slept. The Flourete tips gleamed silver in the moonlight. At this range, I could even see a trio of tiny rubies fixed to the figure's hands and feet, like droplets of jewel-toned blood. 

I didn't move while Dr. Lilian slid the needles out of me and began to bandage the wound site. The stinging pain barely registered over the other aches and pains vying for my attention. My head throbbed dully, the inside of my mouth felt like sandpaper, and I could taste bile at the back of my throat. Dr. Lilian nodded sympathetically when I raised the freed hand to cradle my head. 

"Worse than a hangover, isn't it? You lost almost forty percent of your blood volume. It took us a hot minute to find a donor. We don't have any human blood on hand, so we had to take it straight from the vein. Was I correct in assuming you didn't want to be a therianthrope?" 

I nodded emphatically. "It's not a fate worse than death but if I can avoid it..." 

She pursed her lips. "Yes, it is much simpler to be human, isn't it? In any case, you ought to thank your friend Catherine. She was on hand, a universal donor, and willing to give. It saved your life. Ms. Vespucci offered as well but it would have been dangerous for the fetus to lower blood volume that drastically. You're still going to feel under the weather, I'm afraid. We couldn't take more than a pint and a half from your friend and that was pushing things. You need to rest and draw upon your master's power to replentish what you've lost."

Dr. Lilian stripped her gloves off and tossed them into a biohazard bin. "The Master has already completed your paperwork. You're free to go, Ms. Blake. Mr. Zeeman has offered to drive you home." 

I eyed Richard skeptically. "Why you?" 

He shrugged, and the muscle tone in his shoulders and arms was evident even beneath the oodles of yarn on the sweater vest. "Cherry has a shift at the Burgess-Price building so she won't have time to drive you and make it into the office on time. Your apartment complex is on my way to work. I'll drop you off." 

"After getting her something to eat," Dr. Lilian tacked on. "She'll need protein, iron, and Vitamin C." 

"McDonald's okay?" Richard asked. "Or do you have a different fast food preference?" 

"McDonald's is great," I said unenthusiastically. I wasn't sure that my stomach would tolerate anything at the moment. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and frowned at the floral hospital gown I'd been thrust into. 

"I don't suppose I have to wear this out?" 

Waltzing out in a hospital gown to face reporters at the ass-end of morning. Could the day start off any worse?

"About that..." Cherry said, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes twinkled and it looked like it was painful to hold in the laugh I could see etched into the lines of her face. She swung a bag up so I could see it. "The Master gave me your measurements and a credit card. I might have gone a little nuts in the meantime." 

I closed my eyes and groaned again. 

Yes. Yes, it _so_ could.


	6. Chapter 6

"Should I have gotten you a third?" Richard asked. 

I sucked empty air through the straw, put out when there wasn't more in the large plastic cup. The first orange juice he'd ordered sat empty in the drink carrier next to the Coke he'd polished off. He'd asked for my usual and then ordered four more. It'd been impressive to watch him eat four bacon, egg, and cheese bagels successively. He'd even polished off my hashbrown when I'd offered it to him. Ah, the incredible therian metabolism at work. Like built-in ephedrine. Cherry would never have to worry about straining the seams of her tight, mostly leather wardrobe. 

I, however, looked ready to burst out of the strapless shirt she'd bought. Tube tops just weren't meant for women with my proportions. I'd arranged the accompanying jacket she'd bought across my midriff. It wasn't that I was ashamed of my weight, exactly. I stayed in shape and watched what I ate the majority of the time. But this top did little to hide the burn scars that ran the length of my left side. Or any of my other scars for that matter. I didn't like flashing them at the specky teenager who'd taken our order. If that made me a prude, so be it. 

The black lace mini skirt would have looked adorable on someone with longer legs. Short skirts and baggy sweaters seemed to be the trend for tall, slender young women these days. I frowned as the thought came to me. Dear God, I was starting to sound like Judith. 

"I'll be fine. Are you going to finish your other Coke?" 

"If you want it, go for it."

The large plastic cup was dripping condensation and I fumbled it for a second before wedging the straw between my lips. Sweet, sweet bubbly Coke washed over my tongue and I sighed. I didn't have many vices but this was one of the few. Richard watched me drink with a wry, half-smile of amusement. 

"Water would be better, you know. Caffeine is a mild diuretic and that's the last thing you need right now." 

"Water can kiss my ass," I mumbled around the straw. "I want sugar. Real sugar, not that aspartame crap. I'm so goddamn thirsty." 

Richard laughed. "I think you might curse as fluently as my Uncle Joey. He's in construction." 

"I learned from Grandma Blake, actually. Jack-of-all-trades, that woman. Small business owner, a dog breeder, amateur mechanic, crack shot, single mother of two, among other things. She taught me almost everything I know." 

"She sounds like an amazing woman," Richard said, clearing the crumbs from his lap. "I'd love to meet her someday." 

"She's at my apartment at the moment, watching the troll-hounds I brought on the hunt. We were supposed to do breakfast before she started the three-hour trip home. That's all shot to hell." 

I sighed and leaned against the headrest. If I'd been lucky, she'd have slept through the media shitstorm and I could give her my version of events. I at least had the solace of knowing the rest of my family would remain blissfully ignorant for a while. The Blake household had switched entirely to streaming services after I'd left for college. Andria was busy completing her undergraduate degree and barely dug her nose out of a book these days. Josh was twelve and worshiped the God of Mario Kart to the exclusion of all else. Dad would be following whatever sport he fancied at the moment, and Judith would be in the kitchen listening to Dr. Laura or some other radio talk show. Grandma Blake was the only one who stayed abreast of current events.

"Sorry. Anything I can do to help?" 

"Distract me." 

"How?" 

"Small talk, I guess. Where are you heading after you drop me off?" 

"Jennings Junior High school. I'm a teacher there." 

I glanced over at him in surprise. "Really? I thought that therianthropes couldn't be hired as caregivers, teachers, food service workers, or first responders." 

"We're not supposed to be. But unlike military and police, most of those positions don't have mandatory blood work done to confirm."

"Are you sure that's safe?" 

Richard's eyes narrowed but he didn't take them off the road. "What, you think I'm going to maul my students?" 

"I don't know. How long have you been a werewolf?"

"A few years. I caught it from a bad batch of the vaccine while I was still student-teaching and finishing up a degree in preternatural biology. Trust me, I'm safe as houses." 

I grimaced around the straw. From the vaccine. That fairly reeked of irony. For a while, it had been in vogue to take the newly developed battery of vaccines against therianthropic strains. It'd been pushed through the FDA at warp speed and shoved at consumers like a new religion. That had stopped when a rash of new, unsupervised turnings had resulted from bad batches of the vaccine. The retroviruses that composed most therian strains were aggressive and even a weakened version could often kick the stuffing out of human antibodies. Richard had probably jumped on the bandwagon for his own job security and been fucked over by unscrupulous politicians and shady agents in the private sector. 

This sounded like a sore subject, so I let it drop. My head ached too much to argue. 

"Preternatural biology with an emphasis on what, exactly? Did you want to teach it someday as a general education course or pursue a specific branch? I was looking into preternatural biochemistry or microbiology after I finished my undergraduate degree." 

Richard did look over at me then, surprise sponging away the bitterness that had set in the planes of his face. 

"You studied preternatural biology?" 

I nodded. "I wanted to do a tour with the Army and then go into R and D, but I was kicked out of the program." 

"Why?" 

"My animating ability was discovered. Believe me, Richard, I know what it's like to be discriminated against because of something you can't change. I'm not going to out you if that's what you're worried about. My only goal at present is to get out of this shit storm alive." 

"Fair." He paused, returned his eyes to the road, and raised a hand like he might nervously adjust his hair. I did that sometimes when I was uncomfortable. He let it drop when he found nothing to tousle. "And to answer your question, I wanted to go into preternatural wildlife conservation. My master's thesis and eventually my dissertation will be centered on possible conservation efforts for endangered preternatural creatures living in Missouri. My advisor thinks I should narrow it down to one species but I'm having trouble. There's a selection of trolls in south Missouri, but they've been pretty well-documented. There are lesser castes of fae, Ozark Howlers, thunderbirds, all of them _supposedly_ in the state but I wouldn't even know where to start looking." 

"What about nixe? They've been mostly eradicated from Europe but there is a small population living in the Stillwater Reservoir."

He arched an eyebrow. "And you know this how?"

I grinned. "My paternal great-grandfather brought over eight breeding pairs from Germany when he immigrated to the United States and dumped them into the nearest body of water when he finally settled. He had them stuffed into ceramic jugs to smuggle them out. The ship's captain probably thought he was a lush. Didn't think much of foreigners, according to all the stories. They're probably the only ones of their kind in the U.S. The current nixe clan leader is named Lamar. I can introduce you if you like, but you'll need to take gifts if you want to visit while I'm not there. Anoint a black animal sacrifice with three drops of blood and offer him damp snuff."

Richard stared at me long enough that the light turned green. He casually flipped the person behind us the bird when they leaned on their horn. I couldn't help but smile. I was beginning to like Richard. 

"You'd really do that for me?" 

"Sure. What are friends for?" 

"Is that all you're looking for? A friend?" 

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, grateful that my apartment complex was in sight. 

"I don't know, Richard. This stuff with Jeanette is complicated. We go out together at least a few times a month." 

"That's political," he said, waving away my objection with one large, calloused hand. "Do you want something real? Or are you seeing someone already?" 

"Are you asking me out, Richard Zeeman?" 

"Spelunking next weekend, if you're game." 

"I'm not great with small spaces," I admitted sheepishly. "But I know a great place to rock climb." 

He smiled then, flashing very white teeth. It made the lines around his eyes crinkle and set the rich color of his eyes sparkling. My stomach did an odd flip. I'd forgotten what it felt like to be affected by a man's smile. The only person who'd been giving me butterflies recently was the annoyingly winsome Master of the City. I had no clue how much of the attraction stemmed from her and how much from me. Here, the math was pretty clear-cut. Smart, attractive, available man meets a like-minded woman.

I liked it when things were simple. 

"It's a date."

I gave Richard my number after we parked in the complex and stared after him when he pulled out. That had been an unexpectedly pleasant addition to the morning. When he was finally out of sight I zipped myself into the jacket Cherry had bought and trudged inside. I was tired, achy, and I needed a nap before I turned up for work. I couldn't deal with Bert's shit while running on fumes. 

But the second I stepped inside my apartment I knew sleep was unlikely to be in my near future. 

The stack of magazines on my coffee table had been flung to the far corners of the room. One of my armchairs was overturned and my widescreen TV had been cracked. A pair of shapes were sprawled out on my living room area rug. At first glance, it almost looked sexual. The lean, moderately attractive blonde man was on the bottom, being straddled by a woman. She had fluffy, cotton-white hair and wore a floral blouse.

Then I blinked and the scene resolved itself fully. The man on bottom was...Edward.

They were each disheveled, covered in blood and bruises, and had gotten handfuls of each other's hair. Grandma Blake had a Colt Detective Special wedged under his jaw. He had his Sig Sauer between her eyes. Angelou and Plath circled the pair, snarling at Edward with every pass. The scene was surreal and I blurted the only thing I could think to say.

"What the fuck is going on here?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of people said they really liked Grandma Blake so I've decided to give her a cameo. Not a huge role in this fic but I think it will still be fun. :)


	7. Chapter 7

Both combatants craned their necks to look at me, grimacing when the motion wrenched their hair. Other than that small motion, neither moved. Grandma Blake did not dismount. Edward’s Adam’s apple bobbed with every swallow. Even Angelou and Plath paused in their relentless pacing to regard me with somber eyes. 

I reached over without taking my eyes off the pair and flicked the lights on. Both flinched as the bright fluorescence momentarily blinded them. Edward used the momentary reprieve to yank himself free of Grandma Blake’s grasp. He had to sacrifice a hank of hair to do it, hissing a low oath as he rolled out of arm’s reach. 

Grandma Blake let the handful of golden hairs trickle through her fingers onto the carpet, getting a two-handed grip on the Colt. She had a split lip and bruise blooming across one cheekbone. She kept her cornflower blue eyes narrowed on Edward as he rose to his knees. He still had the Sig naked in his hand, but pointed at the ground now, as though my presence had magically diffused...whatever the hell was going on here. 

He didn’t look much better than Grandma Blake. One eye was swollen shut, his nose was broken, and he, too, was sporting a busted lip. His navy suit jacket had split a seam at the shoulder. I’d never seen Edward in formal wear. When masquerading as Edward he wore grays and blacks, utterly unremarkable. Despite being fairly handsome, you’d never pick him out of a crowd. It was a wonderful trait in an assassin. 

As his alter ego, the bounty hunter Ted Forester, he was a down-south good-ol’-boy, all sweet tea and homemade apple pie. Charming, until he shoved a pistol beneath your jaw and pulled the trigger. He’d do it with a smile on his face. He’d earned himself the nickname Death in supernatural circles, an unstoppable, apocalyptic force. He may not be the end of the known world, but he could be the end of mine if I weren’t careful. 

So it was even more baffling that my aging grandmother had gotten the drop on him. Not only that but had put up enough of a fight to bloody and pin him. The troll hounds had undoubtedly helped level the playing field, but the fact she could do it at all was...impressive.

“I asked you both a question,” I said, deadly calm. “What’s going on here?” 

“This reprobate picked your lock,” Grandma Blake said, trailing Edward with the gun as he stood. She climbed to her feet, favoring one leg. He’d probably kicked her. It was a miracle she didn’t have broken bones. 

“I was trying to get a hold of Anita,” Edward said. There was just a hint of a Boston accent in his voice now. This wasn’t Edward. He wasn’t playing Ted, either. Curiouser and curiouser. 

“Grandma put the gun down. He’s not here to hurt me. He’s my...” I cast around and couldn’t think of a better lie. “Boyfriend.” 

“No, he’s not,” Grandma said with a scoff. “You’d have told me if you’d found a beau.” 

She was right. I would have told her about any new romantic developments during our weekly phone calls. She’d been the shoulder I’d cried on after Curtis’ death. She didn’t push for me to move on the way Dad and Judith had. Probably because she’d never remarried after Grandpa Blake passed. She’d once been twenty-five, widowed, and a single mother of two. She knew better than anyone else what I’d gone through in the last three years. She’d have kept the news of a new boyfriend from Dad and Judith for as long as I asked. She really was the best confidante. 

“He’s a boy, and he’s a friend,” I said. “Please lower the gun. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. This is-”

“Robert Brogan,” Edward interjected, reaching into the inside pocket of his coat. I tensed, half expecting him to pull out another gun. Instead, he brandished a shiny, official-looking badge. “I’m with the FBI. I needed to speak with Anita about an ongoing investigation.”

He turned to me and fixed me with an accusatory stare. “Someone wasn’t answering her phone. When I came to your door, you didn’t answer either. Then I got jumped by the geriatric Amazon.” 

I paused, absorbing the wealth of information those sentences offered. Robert J. Brogan was an alias I’d seen in his array of fake IDs and badges. Which meant that he wasn’t in Saint Louis for a contract kill. This was an official mission with the organization he worked for. 

Shit. 

“I was involved in an...incident,” I said, rubbing at my bandaged arm. Dr. Lillian had wrapped my arm from elbow to wrist, covering the slash and bite mark in my forearm. The slash had required six stitches. There was nothing for the puncture wounds but time. 

“I gathered. It was all over my news feed. The assassination attempt in front of the 22nd judicial circuit courthouse.” 

“The what?” Grandma Blake asked, turning on me, eyes huge in her face. “Honey, are you-?” 

“Fine. It’s just a graze. I’m about ninety percent sure I wasn’t the target.” 

Of course, someone could have been shooting through Jeanette to get to me. But if I’d been the mark, it would have been smart to hit me when I was alone. Failing that, when there wasn’t another body blocking the shot. The hit didn’t make any sense, no matter what angle I examined it from. The killer had been a rank amateur, counting on the spray and pray method to get the job done. Before Edward turned up, I could have bought the theory that it was a random hate crime, perpetrated by a radical group like Humans Against Vampires or their splinter group, Humans First. 

If Edward was here, it was bigger than that. Much bigger. If Grandma Blake hadn’t been standing by, practically vibrating with concern, I’d have asked if he was somehow involved. The chances were slim to none, given how sloppy the attempt had been. If Edward had been hired to kill Jeanette, the job would have been done quickly, efficiently, and without fanfare. He’d probably use an M2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle. It was effective up to 1,300 yards. No one would have seen it coming. Richard had informed me they had spotted the shooter fleeing the scene. So not Edward’s style. 

“That’s not comforting, Anita,” Grandma Blake said, finally setting the Colt Detective Special aside. 

She kept it out of Edward’s reach, in case he tried to make a grab for it. Now that the fight was over, she seemed to deflate, the lines in her face deepening. Fatigue curled her shoulders forward, and she finally looked her age. The bruises and cuts looked somehow worse. Edward had been defending himself, but damn if I wasn’t going to pay him back for it. He may have been my mentor, but Grandma Blake was blood. 

“Sit down, Grandma.” 

She crossed her arms stubbornly beneath her breasts. I’d inherited the bustline from the Blake side of the family. She continued to train, so she was unreasonably fit for a woman in her late fifties. 

“Not until I get a damn good explanation,” she said stubbornly. I recognized the stubborn set of her jaw. I saw it in the mirror every day. 

At least she wasn’t going to pieces. If I’d repeated the same story to Judith, I’d have been supporting her through a bout of hysterics by now. Grandma Blake knew how dangerous my job could be. This wasn’t the first time someone had shot me. It wouldn’t be the last. Hell, Grandma Blake had patched me up once or twice. She could handle the truth.

“Ed... Erm... Bobby, you can jump in with an explanation at any time. I’m as much in the dark as you are, Grandma.” 

“Sit,” Edward said, backing my order. He motioned to the table. “You both look like hell.” 

“As if you have any room to talk. How’s the shiner feel, you little rat-faced bastard?” Grandma Blake shot back. 

I stepped between the pair of them, extending a hand like I’d push them apart. Silly, because they were standing on opposite ends of the room. Still, the air crackled with the barely repressed need to do violence. I had a feeling that we were one good insult away from turning my apartment into the OK Corral. 

“Enough! Both of you sit at the table, shut your mouths, and keep your hands to yourselves.” 

They both glared at me with mutiny in their gaze. Neither budged. 

“Please,” I breathed. The weariness was catching up to me. “I need any information you can give me, E...Bobby. What’s going on?” 

No one moved for another half minute and then, grudgingly, both of them sidled over to the table and sank into the chairs. Despite being different ages, genders, and in different professions, they both slouched like sullen teenagers. It might have been funny if the situation weren’t so damn terrifying. I crossed over to the fridge, flipped open the freezer door, and rummaged for a pair of ice packs near the back. After so many injuries, I had enough medical supplies to stock Dr. Lillian’s clinic for a month. I tossed the packs on the table. 

“Now talk, Bobby. What can you tell me about today’s attack?”

With Grandma Blake listening in, it was sure to be an abridged version. I trusted Grandma Blake with the details...up to a point. I’d told no one about Edward’s consistent attempts to recruit me into the organization he worked for. I was sure that the thought would cause even progressive Grandma Blake some disquiet. 

“The attack on the Master of Saint Louis wasn’t the only assassination attempt carried out in the last twenty-four hours. And it is the only one that doesn’t fit the pattern.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“There were four attacks shortly afterward. All vampires, all ancient and powerful. One in New York, one in Dublin, one in Romania. The last vampire attacked was a master visiting Davenay in Saint Louis.” He began ticking down on his fingers. “The vampires best known as Belle Morte, Moroven, the Dragon, and the Earthmover.” 

Cold fear settled into my bones and made them ache. “Oh God.” 

Edward nodded, a grim little smile curling his lips. “Someone is trying to off the Vampire Council.”


	8. Chapter 8

I needed more details. Details that only Edward could give me, and he wouldn’t talk until we had some privacy. So, though it went against every fiber of my being, I turned my back on my injured grandmother and walked into the bedroom with Edward. 

Angelou followed me to the door, rubbing along my legs to saturate the fabric with her scent. It was a protective measure, and one she wouldn’t ordinarily have taken. Usually, a troll hound’s size ad aggressive nature was enough to deter most predators. They resembled their distant cousin, the Neapolitan Mastiff, with thick brindle fur, hanging jowls, deep-set eyes, and floppy ears. In size, they were much closer to the extinct great-granddaddy of the race, the dire wolf. The scent of a troll hound would scare off even a therianthrope unless they had a death wish. 

Finally, I closed the door, leaving Angelou to whine just outside. 

“Something you’re not telling me?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. Edward was fiddling with the lock on my closet door. Probably a little paranoid to lock that as well, but the space also doubled as my armory, so to hell with it. 

“Hm?” 

“I’ve only seen troll hounds react that way to therianthropes. So is there something you’ve been hiding from me?”

Edward stopped what he was doing and turned to face me. “No more than the usual.” 

“Bullshit.” 

“I mean it, Anita. I’m clean.” 

“So you won’t mind putting that to the test?” I asked, extending a hand toward him. 

I hadn’t sensed any therian energy wafting off him, but that meant very little. Powerful therianthropes could hide their auras and appear very normal at first glance. The eyes could be fooled, but magic didn’t lie. Psychic ability worked best with proximity or skin-to-skin contact. If he touched me, I’d feel his beast. Assuming he had one.

Edward finally slid his picks out of the lock, sighed, and turned to face me. “I’m not furry, Anita. I just have associates who are.” 

“Like the ‘associates’ you released in the Ozarks?” I asked, a hint of venom seeping into my tone. 

Edward grinned suddenly, like I’d just name-dropped a pleasant trip we’d taken together. It lit his face from within, like I’d flicked a switch. Somehow, I found the smile more sinister than his usual placid silence and dead-eyed stare. Glad at least one of us found that trip entertaining. I’d found it enlightening, for damn sure, but not entertaining.

“Ah, that.” 

“Edward, just take my damn hand or explain yourself. I don’t care which, but you have sixty seconds before I boot you out of my apartment and take my chances with the hitters.” 

That was a lie, and we both knew it. Someone was coming for Jeanette. And, like it or not, I had to keep her safe. With two marks already in place, the death of my vampire “master” would have had serious repercussions. By sealing the third mark, I’d bent over and given my ass a big’ ol’ smooch, bidding it bon voyage should something happen to her. 

Edward didn’t call me on it. He folded himself down onto my mattress, patting the black duvet beside him. 

“I’ll stand,” I said, planting my feet stubbornly in the hideous blue shag carpeting the landlady installed in every apartment. 

Edward appeared to be swallowing back a sigh. “I see where you get your moxie from, Anita. Your grandmother is a tough broad.” 

I snorted. “Who still uses words like that? And don’t change the subject. Why do you smell like a therianthrope?”

“You can be damn irritating sometimes, you know that?” 

“So I’ve been told,” I said dryly. “Now talk. Who are these associates?” 

“There are wereanimals in my cell along with two vampires., but around ninety-eight percent of Van-Cleef’s organization is human. The monsters have to be damn good. The ones he hires are too dangerous to be allowed to roam. Meaning they’ve killed over five of his best to join.” 

“Cell?” I repeated, filing away the rest of the statement away for further exploration at a later date. “How many cells are there?” 

Edward shrugged. “Not sure. And it’s not really my business, so long as I’m getting paid. These men originally served in the Chicago outfit, under a vampire master named Augustine. Swanmanes. Blaine and Barry Brewster.” 

Okay, I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Swan Mafia? Now there’s a ballet I haven’t seen.” 

Edward gave me the look the comment deserved, eyes flat and unamused, his mouth twisting down into a frown. 

“You have a biology degree, Anita. You know better than to say shit like that.” 

“Preternatural biology, but yes, I do. They’re not pushovers, and they don’t have many natural predators. Wolves, foxes, and racoons will occasionally attack them, but they prefer to steal eggs. Swans, particularly Mute Swans, are very aggressive when defending their mates, nests, or territory. They’ve tipped canoes, kayakers, and attacked pedestrians. There’ve been broken bones, sure, but as far as I’m aware, only one person has ever died from a swan attack. But Swanmanes are a born therian species, not turned. Voluntary studies have shown them to be non-violent when exposed to similar stimuli.” 

“And it’s a good thing they aren’t,” Edward muttered. “Therian species’ animal forms can be three to four times larger than the real thing. Can you imagine facing down a swan that was twelve feet long, a hundred pounds, and sports a twenty-four-foot wingspan, even _without_ the base aggression of a turned shifter?”

I _did_ picture it and instantly sobered. If a regular, twenty-six-pound male swan could viciously attack and injure a person, I really didn’t want to see what a determined, intelligent swanmane could do. 

I finally sank down onto the bed next to Edward, pretending the brush of skin across his bare forearm was an accident. He hummed with something when I touched him, but it wasn’t a beast. It wasn’t even magic. His aura, maybe. It flowed like thick water. I’d never been good at aura reading. I was an animator, not a witch or an empath. My job didn’t really require that level of magical mastery. Unlike some of my peers, I’d never had to learn to raise the dead. I had to learn how not to. I’d only been able to do this little trick a handful to times, and always with people I was close to or had shared magic with. Curtis, Grandma Flores, and Manny were the only ones that sprang immediately to mind.

In my head, it felt a little like the one and only trip I’d taken through the Everglades. The water was cool, murky and full of deadly potential. Things stirred in Edward, his own personal demons hidden like gators ready to snap him, or anyone who crossed him up. 

I shuddered and drew my hand back hastily. Edward watched me do it with a tight smile. 

“You through?” 

“I...Jesus, Edward, what happened to you?” 

Edward shrugged. “You think assassins come from happy homes, Anita?” 

Point. “I’m sorry, Edward. I shouldn’t have...” 

He shrugged and leaned even further back, propping himself up on his elbows. “No, don’t apologize. Cautious is better than dead.”

At least on that we could agree. 

“What can you tell me about the attacks?” 

“That the contract wasn’t offered to our organization. No one knows where this is coming from. That’s damn peculiar, Anita. Van Cleef’s people are the best. Even if we ultimately passed on the contracts, we should have at least known about them. We don’t get caught unawares. And certainly not four times in a row.” 

Goosebumps strained at every inch of exposed flesh as his meaning sank in. I counted on Death being the biggest, baddest motherfucker out there. And this time, he wasn’t.

“You’re sure?” 

“Sure that I wasn’t asked? Absolutely. Am I sure that Van Cleef is being honest? No. War seems like the sort to do this. The bitch seems to thrive on chaos.” 

“War?” I repeated. “As in...?” 

“If you’ve gained a certain level of infamy among the monsters, you can earn a title like mine. A horseman. A harbinger. I still have the highest kill count, but Isabel is close. She lets the title go to her head. Insists on being called Bellona by the peons.” His smile turned a little mocking. “She hates it when I call her Bells.” 

To be entirely fair to the unknown woman, I’d have wanted to throat punch Edward for downplaying the accomplishment too. 

“You can be a chauvinist prick, you know that? Some of the top hitters in the world are women.” 

“I know that. But she’s a troublemaker, Anita. If someone doesn’t knock her down a few pegs, she’s gonna ruin things for the rest of us.”

I raised a brow at him. “And if I joined your organization, what? You’d knock me down a few pegs too?” 

He clucked his tongue and gave me a reproving look. “This ain’t about sexism. It’s about maintaining secrecy. If those assassination attempts had been successful, there’d be four open council positions, and one major city in need of a master. Even one successful attempt would have resulted in infighting. With four...” 

I scrubbed my hands over my bare arms, trying to banish the goosebumps. “It would be a bloodbath. All-out war.” 

Edward nodded. “It’s her style. Since your vampire master is the outlier, I figured I’d start here and work my way back to the mysterious perp.”

It took every ounce of willpower I possessed to look at him without squirming. “You know about that?” 

“It’s on public record, Anita. And all over the internet, as of last night. I don’t understand it, but I know you’ve got your reasons. I trust you know what you’re doing.” 

Goodie. That made one of us.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made some modifications to the horsemen thing. For one, I don't necessarily want Anita to be one just yet. In canon, it always seems to me that Hamilton has to have Anita hoard titles like a tiny, misogynistic dragon. (Seriously, she reads like the Misogynistic She-Devil type in this Psychology Today Article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mysteries-love/201908/12-ways-spot-female-misogynist) 
> 
> As I keep saying, I want there to be good/competent females in this series, not just jealous haters and victims. Anita simply cannot be the only competent one in the universe. It makes things ridiculous. Like the fact that in canon she's the Lupa, Bolverk, Nimir Ra, Regina, a horseman, the best necromancer, Queen of all Vampires and Therianthropes, continue ad nausem...it's just way too much. So if I do end up giving her the title, she'll have to earn it and it may or may not be War. 
> 
> Also, the thing about swans being "everyone's meat" bugs me. I mean, swans aren't docile little things. It's like if it isn't a predator species Hamilton thinks that it's inferior and weak. Prey animals still have mechanisms to fight back. They don't go willingly to their deaths either. Pretty much the whole dominance thing bugs me. I know that dominance fights and hierarchies exist in nature, but therians (the infected ones anyway) were also once people. They shouldn't become BDSM, blood, and sex-obsessed creatures because of a disease they caught. Maybe in the beginning but not all the time. 
> 
> To me, it just reeks of victim-blaming. That if something bad happens to you it's somehow your fault for letting it happen. (Ex, a quote from the Laughing Corpse about Wheelchair Wanda: "I was mad at Harold Gaynor for victimizing Wanda. Mad at Wanda for allowing it.")
> 
> So yeah, sorry about the big rambly author's note. But I have strong feels about the treatment of some animal groups in this universe.


	9. Chapter 9

I’d just emerged from the bedroom, still rubbing goosebumps from my upper arms when my cell phone rang. I had to sprint across the room and stir the contents of my purse, barely catching it in time. Radiohead’s _Creep_ filled the silence, sounding like a death knell in my bleak frame of mind. After the scene last night, I’d been expecting a call from RIPIT, telling me to turn in my consultancy badge and the emergency lights they’d issued for my Jeep. 

The fact that it was Zerbrowski calling sort of pissed me off. If I was going to be canned, Dolph could at least deign to do it in person before he crushed his moral shetland pony under the weight of his own bigotry. 

“Blake,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I failed. It came out more than a little waspish. I’d just been dragged from the arms of death not too many hours ago. I was cranky. Sue me. 

“You going to give me a chance to talk, Anita? Or are you intent on trying to rip my testicles through the receiver somehow?” 

I sighed, most of the anger dribbling away with the exhale. Zerbrowski had a point. I had to at least listen to what he had to say before I kneecapped the messenger. 

“Am I fired?” 

There was a very brief, very loaded silence on the other end of the line. “Not yet.” 

“I’m sensing a very large, acne-scarred but coming,” I said. 

Zerbrowski snorted a laugh. “That’s a lovely visual.”

“Zerbrowski.” 

“Fine, fine.” If he’d been standing in the room with me, he’d probably have thrown his hands up in a push-away gesture. “You’re not fired. But you _are_ on probation. If you want to keep the job, Dolph needs you to visit a recent crime scene in Wydown Skinker. We think we have vampire attacks but...” 

“But what?” I snapped. I was so damn tired. A little dizzy, even. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to visit a crime scene. “It’s not that difficult to determine if it was a vampire kill.” 

“Will you do it or not?” 

I thunked my head against the wall. A reasonable woman would tell Dolph to go fuck himself and carry on with her life. Didn’t I have enough to deal with already? Bert had booked me solid until Christmas, giving me more and older dead to contend with every week. A fact I couldn’t even gripe about after I’d lost yesterday’s court case. 

My hand lifted from my lap to trace the contours of the crucifix that hung heavy between my breasts. I could feel the subtle dings and dents in the metal, where someone long ago had shaped it. No perfect, machine-quality metal jewelry in the 15th century. Someone had fashioned this from silver for a Lord’s mistress. And, over six hundred years later, that mistress had gifted it to me. It was surreal when I really stopped to think about it. 

The crucifix was another reminder of just how much responsibility had been heaped onto my shoulders. Jeanette’s problems were now my problems. A killer on par with Edward could be maneuvering the vampires into all-out war. World War V. Jesus. 

The Taskforce was capable enough. Did I really need to consult on another case, just to stay in Dolph’s good graces? 

Yes, damn it, I did. If I was ousted from RIPIT for legitimate reasons, so be it. But I was not going to be cast out because Dolph had a hate-on for all vampires.

“Fine. I’ll take a look. If I make good time, I can meet you in a half-hour.” 

“Actually, if you hurry, it may not even take five.” 

I pulled the phone away so I could glower at the receiver. It wasn’t overly impressed with me. 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” 

“It means I’m outside, in visitors’ parking. Reports say you lost a lot of blood and I didn’t think you’d be up to driving.” 

Maybe on another day I’d have been touched but, at the moment, the presumption just sent fresh prickles of irritation seething over my skin. Zerbrowski knew I’d say yes, which meant I was getting predictable. Predictable people are easier to kill. I opened my mouth, almost told him where he could stick the nice-guy routine, then snapped it shut again. There was no time to spread a salve on my hurt feelings. If I stood any chance of salvaging my position, I had to grit my teeth and push through. 

Unbidden, a lyric from one of my mother’s favorite musicals danced through my head.

_Wipe off that “full of doubt” look, slap on a happy grin! And spread sunshine all over the place. Just put on a happy face!_

I was no Dick Van Dyke, that was for damn sure.

“Fine. Let me change. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” 

I hung up without saying goodbye, flexing my fingers around the phone in fresh irritation as I realized precisely what I’d done. I’d picked up that particular habit from Dolph. 

“You’re leaving?” 

The tone, more than the question, made me lift my chin and consider my grandmother. She hadn’t moved from her place by the kitchen table. Edward had been convinced we’d need to barricade ourselves in the closet to keep the particulars from Grandma Blake. I’d known better. She was a classy woman when push came to shove, and classy women didn’t listen at keyholes. 

She’d buried her hands in Angelou and Plath’s ruffs like they were furry anchors keeping her tethered to the earth. I wasn’t sure what she’d do if she was forced to let go. The look in her big, cornflower blue eyes stopped me cold. 

She was afraid. For me. 

She wasn’t shy about expressing her feelings and she didn’t mince words, a trait I’d always admired. I’d seen her pissed plenty. I’d seen her over the moon, seen her smug, seen her proud. Once, I’d even seen her cry when the anniversary of Grandpa Blake’s death rolled around. But through all that life had thrown at her, I’d never seen her scared. 

My throat felt tight and I had to search for my voice. When I found it, at last, it barely rose above a whisper. 

“Yeah. I’m leaving. I don’t think I’ll be gone long.” 

“Police or the money-grubbing bastard?” she checked, sitting up straighter. Her expression closed off, like curtains being drawn shut, concealing that barest sliver of worry. I suspected she knew what it would cost me to try to assure her. She really was the world’s best grandmother. 

The sour tone in which she asked the last also made my lips curl upward into an amused smile. She was of the opinion that I ought to tell my unscrupulous boss, Bert Vaughn, where to shove his shady, sexist sentiments and begin my own animating firm. I’d tried explaining the iron-clad non compete clause Bert had worked into our contracts, but she still persisted.

“Police,” I said, stuffing the phone back into the purse. “It looks like a vampire kill. They just need confirmation before they can ship the body to the morgue. It’s just a formality.” 

From there the mortician would consult the victim’s will if one was available. If there was no immediate cremation or staking requests, the body would be held for observation until the three-day risk period had passed and it could be confirmed truly dead. I wasn’t precisely a lie. This was a fairly common component of my vampire hunting duties. Bert couldn’t even bitch about the absences it caused. Though most vampire executioners were technically civilians, we were protected under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. If I had to be absent from my regular nine to five (or more accurately five to nine) job in order to protect the Tri-state area I served, Bert couldn’t consider it a firing offense. This _could_ have been just a routine business matter. 

But I had a crazy hunch that maybe there was more to it this time. No need to worry Grandma Blake, however. 

I tried to regain my feet in one of those sexy rolls that Jeanette and many of the therianthropes could manage. I staggered, clipped the coffee table, and almost landed on my ass again. Edward had a fist to his hand, trying to conceal a smirk. I could see it flash through his eyes, though, and caught the subtle shaking of his shoulders. 

“Yuck it up,” I said, words half a growl. “I want you both to visit Urgent Care and get checked out. I don’t care what story you work up, but I want you back here by the time I’m through talking to the police. And if one of you kills the other, I’ll be incredibly pissed with the survivor. I want you both alive when I get back. Am I clear?” 

They both agreed, though they still looked vaguely mutinous. I suspected a battle for the driver’s seat would ensue after I left the building. And while it was nerve-wracking to leave Death babysitting my very capable grandmother, it didn’t change the fact I still had a job to do. RPIT deserved any advanced warning I could give them about the assassination attempts.

It was that thought alone that allowed me to march into my bedroom and change into something crime-scene ready. The tube top, skirt, and jacket would never again see the light of day if I could help it. I thought briefly about re-gifting them to Andria, but decided that was probably a tacky thing to do. And too tacky an outfit for even Andria to wear anywhere but a nightclub. 

I selected the white pinstripe blouse, and a black cardigan Grandma Blake had bought me last Christmas. It’d come with a matching skirt that I’d never worn, even before my left leg came to resemble a stubby, melted candle. Church-wear, she’d called it. As if God should truly care what you wore when you stepped up to an altar. As someone had once said, churches were hospitals for sinners, not museums for saints. 

The sensible black trousers and dress shoes were a better choice for a crime scene, even if I’d been inclined to wear the skirt. If I flashed my panties at a crime scene, the rest of RPIT would never let me live it down. Police detectives didn’t derive much amusement from their jobs, so they took special joy in taking the piss out of each other wherever they could. I was just an easier target than most. I didn’t chalk it up to sexism. If Zebrowski had flashed his undies at a scene, I’d have given him shit for it too. 

The blouse was long-sleeved to conceal my wrist sheaths, and the cardigan was long enough to conceal the Browning whichever way I chose to carry. This time I chose the inner pants holster to give myself a few seconds’ advantage should the would-be assassin turn up again. I wasn’t sure I bought Edward’s theory. If this Bellona person was as good as he claimed, she wouldn’t make rookie mistakes. 

War was a woman. Huh. Who’d have thunk it? 

When I emerged from my bedroom dressed, armed, and with a goody bag of extra toys, Edward and Grandma Blake had already gone. Angelou and Plath were settled quietly in their kennels, awaiting her return. Their deep-set eyes tracked me as I slung purse and long gym bag over my shoulder, locked up, and exited the apartment. 

The sawed-off shotgun and mini Uzi hidden in its bottom compartment were technically illegal and probably overkill on a routine job. Still, better paranoid than dead. The bag had come courtesy of Edward, one of the many forms of camouflage his organization had devised over the years. If I joined up, I’d get more goodies and a company car. Edward’s Chevrolet pickup had been tricked out with secret compartments, some large enough to contain bodies, designed to thwart anything that could conceivably be thrown at them. Police, K-9 units, hackers, none of them had managed to uncover Edward’s secrets yet. The large, body-shaped compartments in the bed of the truck were also faraday cages, blocking signal from coming in or leaving the enclosed space. I just bet Edward allowed some of his hostages to keep their cell phones, just to get a kick out of their hysterics later. 

And this was the sort of man I was leaving my grandmother with. Jesus. When had my life gotten so damn bleak? 

My apartment building is a little off the highway, hidden from direct view by a gas station, a few homes, and a copse of trees. The building itself is like an economy-sized square composed of faded red brick. The trees that bordered it on the west were shedding their leaves, coating the grass and walkways so that it was almost impossible to move without making noise. Every crunching step sounded like a rockslide to my overstretched nerves. It felt like my back and forehead had been tattooed with handy crosshairs to make the job easier. 

Thankfully, Zerbrowski’s black Dodge Charger was located a handy six yards from the front entrance, so I didn’t have far to sprint. Only a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. The burns I’d sustained during the District Serial Case had seriously impaired my mobility. Doctors had informed me it would be a permanent, life-altering injury and, if I hadn’t been connected to Jeanette via vampire marks, it would have been. The appearance of them hadn’t really improved, but I was mostly pain-free. 

Maybe that was the impetus for my insanity yesterday evening. Did some part of me feel a sense of recompense? 

I hoped not. 

Zerbrowski raised a brow at me as I slid the overlarge gym bag into his backseat. It made an ominous rattle or two before settling. 

“Before you ask, it’s my expanded vampire hunting kit,” I said, sliding into the passenger’s seat. 

Zerbrowski waited until I’d fastened my seatbelt before easing out of his parking space. “Awfully big for stakes, hammers, holy water vials, and semi-automatics.” 

He kept his voice mild, his face carefully free of expression, which was a tell in and of itself. Most cops don’t retreat behind that veil of unflappable calm until the shit has really hit the fan. Either Zerbrowski was angry with me, or I was in more trouble than I’d first believed. 

“There’s a shotgun as well.” 

“Licensed?”

“Yes.” 

I tried to sound offended, but it was difficult, knowing that I had two very _unlicensed_ guns hidden beneath the false bottom of the bag. I had no moral high ground to stand on. One could even say I was shouting up at him from the valley. 

Zerbrowski’s hands flexed around the wheel and he had his back away from the seat like he was carrying a knot the size of a softball between his shoulder blades.

The silence in the car after the question was so thick I could have molded it in my hands. Heavy and dense like clay. Guess that made Zerbrowski Patrick Swayze. That’d make him happy. 

I’d never been the girl who had to fill the silence with chatter. I’d always thought that sort of screamed something about a person, being unable to be alone with their thoughts. But this time, I _had_ to say something. Zerbrowski didn’t act like this, and I needed to know what the fuck was going on.

“Are you mad at me?” 

Even coming out of my mouth, the words sounded so insipid. He wasn’t my dad, and he wasn’t my boyfriend. He was probably the closest I’d ever get to having a creepy uncle. 

Zerbrowski hunched lower, almost bending over the steering wheel. We’d merged onto the highway, heading for Wydown Skinker. The neighborhood nearly hit the city limits on the west. Just north, you’d find Washington University in St. Louis. I was an alumnus, though I’d attended none of the functions after Curtis’ death, and I trashed the pleas for money when they came in the mail. 

The neighborhood was one of the more upscale, which was probably why RPIT had been called in. All those poor, rich white folks too scared to allow the regular cops to handle their vampire problem. If this turned out to be nothing, I was going to be pissed. 

“No, Anita, I’m scared for you.” 

I blinked at him, shocked into swallowing the angry retorts I’d been preparing. As idiotic as I found the “guy code” that most police operated by, I had at least learned it. Cops rarely admitted when something bugged them. You could get angry, but not scared. Maybe that was why I’d gotten along with the officers on the Taskforce for so long. That was my modus operandi too. 

“Am I supposed to know what to say to that?” 

Zerbrowski blew out a breath. “The press is circling the crime scene on Aberdeen Place like vultures, Anita.” 

“High-profile victim?” 

“No, it’s the high-profile consultant we’re bringing to the scene.”

It took me a second to get it, and then heat flooded my face. My hands balled into fists on my lap and I struggled mightily not to shout obscenities at him. After all, it wasn’t his fault this was happening. 

When I finally thought I could do it without screaming I said, “You didn’t have to call me, you know.” 

Zerbrowski took a left at the light and began our steady cruise toward the scene. Aberdeen rang a vaguely unpleasant sort of bell, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. 

“I know that. Dolph would have been happy to leave you in the dark, but I convinced him we needed you on this case. This is the fourth body we’ve found.” 

“Fourth?” I repeated, reaching over to clench a hand around the armrest. If I didn’t I was going to slug Dolph the second I singled out his superior mug. Hell, I still might. “How can he allow four vampire kills to skate by and not involve me until now? _How_ , Zerbrowski?”

Zerbrowski had the decency to flinch. “Because we weren’t sure it was vampires, at first. The bites look right but...” 

“But what?” I snapped, beyond pissed now. Who had they been calling in to handle the vamps? There weren’t that many licensed vampire executioners in the state. Manny and I were the only ones in proximity, Manny only dealt with morgue kills these days. Larry and John were trainees and wouldn’t have gone behind my back, even if they’d been fully trained. 

“The bites appear to be made by fangs. Too many fangs, Anita. We know they can’t rise if multiple vampires bit them, and yet, these do. Worse, they’re rising too early. The first body rose and slaughtered the morgue attendant and four security officers trying to contain it. It was only twelve hours dead, Anita. Twelve! I tried to get Dolph to bring you in on things then. He insisted we contain the bodies in the new therian-grade supermax cells they’ve placed in the correctional facility. We haven’t had any more deaths but...” 

Zerbrowski trailed off, shaking his head quickly, as though it would dislodge the image. “They’re damn strong, Anita. They’re changing post-mortem. Not just fangs. It seems to be entire portions of the bone structure. They almost look deformed. Tammy says they feel like vampires, but they don’t _look_ like any vampire I’ve ever seen. I need you to confirm and hopefully tell us how to handle these damn things. Even investigating the deaths is off the table until we know what they are. 

I breathed in and out steadily, searching for some of that inner peace that others are always preaching about. I suspected I’d run out of that limited resource when I was still in single digits. 

“Alright,” I said at last. “I’m going to look into it. But why is Dolph being an ass about this? I have done nothing wrong.” 

“Haven’t you?” The question was still so utterly mild that a better person couldn’t have found fault with it. For once, I was lucky I’d never taken the high road. 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

I could tell immediately when we’d arrived. Blue and red light immediately caught the eye, drawing it to the line of stately homes that lined the street. Reporters and their vehicles formed thick clots on either side of the street, slowing traffic to a crawl. Zerbrowski pulled the Charger in behind a news van and threw it into park. 

“It means that you have been at the epicenter of two murder cases. In neither case did we apprehend the culprit. You say Zachary Freeman was to blame for multiple vampire sacrifices and the swarm of rabid zombies. But did we ever make an arrest? No, and that looks suspicious as hell. But let’s be generous and say that was on the up and up. Then there’s the Reynolds case. You were able to identify the culprits, but by the time RPIT arrived, you’re MIA. All we have is a dead cow, a suspiciously clean crime scene, and witnesses whose stories line up almost exactly. That doesn’t happen, Anita. Not unless someone is lying.” 

I kept my mouth shut, sure I’d throw up if I tried to open it. It felt like I’d just stumbled off a tilt-a-whirl, dizzy and more than a little sick. If I’d been conscious and able to weigh in on the forensic fudging, I’d have told Jeanette all this. 

“And then there’s Harold Gaynor,” Zerbrowski continued. “He and his fiance Cecily had a seemingly unrelated car accident a week later. No one could prove foul play. It was almost like he’d just swerved off the bridge and into the ravine at random. But why oh why would he do something like that, Anita?” 

Again, I didn’t answer. I was definitely nauseous. Jeanette had told me he’d be dealt with in due time. I hadn’t dreamed she’d roll him into committing a murder-suicide via car. 

“I don’t know, Zebrowski,” I whispered. 

“Did you know that he left his entire fortune to an ex? A Wanda Conoley?" Zerbrowski asked. "It just has to go through probate court and then she's a very wealthy woman.”

That did successfully divert my attention. “He what?” 

That knot of tension between his shoulders seemed to ease. “You didn’t know.” 

“Of course I didn’t know!” 

Zerbrowski nodded, as though the matter was settled. He reached for the door handle and pushed it open, letting a sweep of cool autumn air breeze through the charger. He was looking just ahead now, toward the house. Familiarity battered like a fist, demanding attention. If I weren’t recovering from my time as a human juice box, I’d probably have been quicker.

“I had to check. Brace yourself, Anita. I think this one might be tough.”

“Why?” I asked, checking the inner pants holster before we could get underway. 

“Because,” he began slowly. “The victim is Eden Davis.”


	10. Chapter 10

I’d taken point, making for the crowd of reporters like a woman being led to the gallows. I hated public speaking and had passed on the chance to lecture, despite the substantial payout. I stuck to writing scholarly articles for _The Animator_. I enjoyed speaking to reporters even less. Bert liked to shove me out in front of them whenever possible. Said I was more photogenic than middle-aged Macie Robbles. Sexist, ageist bastard.

When Eden’s name penetrated, I slammed to a halt. Of course this place looked fucking familiar. By the end, I’d dreaded visits to Curtis’ family. 

The pale orange brick home was two stories tall and came equipped with five bedrooms and four bathrooms. I’d never understood why a pair of fifty-somethings needed four bathrooms. The only one that saw regular use after Curtis’ departure for college was the enormous bathroom in the master suite. I’d thought I was living in the lap of luxury growing up. Our bungalow-style home had been one of the few I’d seen in Stillwater that had two bathrooms. Hell, most of the homes in Stillwater had wheels. I’d also never understood why so many people still lived in trailers when our fair town was nestled in the heart of tornado alley. 

If I squinted through the mass of reporters and the looming wrought-iron gates, I could just see the house sitting at the top of the hill. A pair of cherry blossom trees ordinarily shaded the house, though, with the onset of autumn, the branches were bare. In April, their home was bursting with an enviable amount of color. The wind would send a fair amount of the pale pink blossoms spiraling to earth, laying like a petal-soft carpet on the neatly trimmed lawn. Eden would often entertain on the veranda. Tea parties with a genuine silver set, absurdly expensive pastries, and teas that I’d hated. It was so damn picturesque and wholesome you expected Norman Rockwell to be out front with an easel. 

There would be more trees out back. Curtis told me they’d originally planned to plant Japanese wisteria. I was grateful they hadn’t. I associated wisteria with my mother. Wisteria, clean linens, and Hypnotique bath powder. Childish as it was, I didn’t want someone I hated to share that. I didn’t want her to taint the memory of my mother with an ounce of unhappiness. 

“What?” I hissed at Zerbrowski as he came level with me. “You didn’t think that was something to mention _before_ we drove here?” 

Zerbrowski gave me very serious eye contact and quirked a brow ever-so-slightly. “Would you have come if I’d told you the truth upfront?” 

It bothered me that I had to think about it for a minute. Had it been anyone else, the answer would have been an immediate and affronted “of course.” But this wasn’t just anyone. It was the woman who’d made my life a living hell for three years. She’d just won a court case against me, taken one of the things I held most dear. And it occurred to me that the timing had been deliberate. 

My stomach lurched violently, and I fought not to bring my lunch up all over his shoes. 

“You _bastard_ ,” I hissed. “You and Dolph wanted to gauge my reaction. You think I did this.” 

Zerbrowski had the good grace to look away, embarrassed. 

“I don’t think you did it, Anita. You were unconscious for most of a day, for Christ’s sake.” 

“But Dolph does,” I pressed. “He thinks I’m the perp in your murder case.” 

Zerbrowski kept his eyes straight ahead, not looking at anything or anyone in particular. His gaze skated above the heads of the reporters, past the cherry blossom trees, and seemingly through the brick walls of the house. He was seeing whatever carnage lay inside. 

Cool fear doused some of the seething rage. Cops didn’t spook easy. Cops attached to the Spook Squad were even harder to rattle. I so didn’t need another nightmare visual. I didn’t need the members of the squad sizing me up like I was one of the bad guys. One wrong twitch and Dolph would feel vindicated. He might even take me in for questioning. 

The problem was, I wasn’t sure it _would_ bother me to see Eden Davis’ still, pale corpse. I’d wished her dead on multiple occasions. I wouldn’t have crossed the street to piss on her if she were on fire. Had I wanted her dead? The honest answer was yes, so long I was the one doing it. Did that make me an awful person? Absolutely. But I’d tempered the reaction. I hadn’t acted on it. 

Someone had. The trick was getting Dolph to believe I wasn’t the guilty party. That would be an uphill battle all the way. 

“Dolph doesn’t believe it. Not really. He’s just pissed.” 

“Because I’m tied to a vampire against my will?” 

Zerbrowski examined me again, and it was a struggle not to squirm. That gaze was knowing. 

“Your little escapade outside the courthouse hit number one on the YouTube trending list, Anita. Granted, it was dark and the picture quality wasn’t great, but it didn’t look like you were unhappy with your lot then. In fact, a cynical person could get the impression you wanted to save that vampire. You _did_ open a vein.”

Damn it. I should have dragged Jeanette to my Jeep before really laying into her. At least the tint would have made it difficult to determine what I’d done. Now my impulsive act was plastered all over the goddamn internet. Hell, maybe I could have used lights and sirens to get her out of the kill zone and to the nearest preternatural clinic. 

“The marks bind our lives together. If she goes, I go,” I said, ducking his gaze, trudging forward toward the reporters once more. “Maybe Dolph thinks that’s a worthwhile sacrifice, but it’s not his ass on the line. So forgive me for not falling weeping onto the pyre.” 

Zerbrowski’s face blanched, and he adjusted his tie almost unconsciously like breathing had suddenly become difficult. 

“God, Anita. I’m sorry. That has to be...” 

“Hell?” I finished dryly. “Yeah, it has its moments.” 

My mind flashed on the nightmare visual of Jeanette’s dead children, her rape, and the terror of standing guard against roaming werewolves with only a kitchen knife. The squalid dirt-floor shack only sheltered them from the howling wind. Cold still snaked into the house and bit into any exposed flesh. Her family had been penniless. The knife hadn’t even been silver. Useless if she’d really had to fend off wolves, and she knew that. It was a sobering thing to realize that you’re just an ineffectual, fleshy barrier between your family and the monster. The only thing that might give them a few seconds to run. 

Through Jeanette, I now knew the true meaning of the word starvation. My stomach twisted up into painful, screaming knots from just the memory. The beginning stages were the worst. Eventually, even the pain stopped. I think that was the most frightening part of the snippets of memory. The blank, numb wall that Jeanette erected between herself and the world. If you expect the worst, it doesn’t surprise you. If you don’t care, it can’t hurt you. Step on others before they step on you. Better victimizer than the victim, if you have the choice. 

I didn’t appreciate the peek I’d gotten into her psyche. The more I learned, the harder it became to hold on to a sense of moral outrage. I liked my moral outrage. It kept me warm at night. It, and a pair of fuzzy penguin slippers. They’re damn cute. I won’t tell if you won’t. 

The crowd of reporters turned on us en masse as we neared. Four uniforms were doing their best to contain the seething mass of reporters, but they were outmatched. Bodies converged, narrowing what had been a ten-foot corridor to a two-foot gap in about three seconds flat. I’d have to turn sideways to traverse the slim gap. There was always a sense of claustrophobia in crowds. The throbbing, breathing mass of them always made me feel like some great beast had swallowed me whole.

A blonde reporter leaned around the uniform on one side and shoved her mic at me like a policeman’s baton. Her hair had come loose from a respectable updo, and her undoubtedly a three-hundred dollar pantsuit was mussed. I was betting this wasn’t the first time she’d grappled with the nice officer. He looked like an easy mark. He was shorter than the other three, a little doughy in the middle like he’d been cheating on his diet. Still, there’d be muscle beneath the softer bits of him. Functional muscle, not the sculpted stuff that looks at home in a bodybuilding championship or on the cover of a bodice ripper. The lower your center of gravity, the easier it is to keep your balance. If it was just the one reporter, he could have kept it up all day. 

She was slender and looked like a stiff breeze would knock her over. Still, there was a madcap gleam in her eye that said she’d cut a bitch to get her quote if that was what it took. 

“Anita Blake, is it true that you’re dating the Master of the City?” she shouted over the officer’s shoulder. 

“Fuck...” I breathed. This was exactly the sort of attention I’d been trying to avoid for months. 

“Come on. Keep moving,” Zerbrowski said, placing a calloused hand at the small of my back, chivvying me forward. 

Ordinarily, I’d have told him to get the fuck off me. I wasn’t an invalid or a helpless damsel. But with this many bodies so close together, I was genuinely afraid of being trampled. I’d seen the victims when crowds stampeded. It was not a pretty way to go. Give me a bullet before blunt force trauma. 

Taking their cue from the blonde, the others began shouting questions. Not all of them personal, but none that were flattering. 

“Anita Blake, is it true that you were last seen with the alleged victim?” A short male reporter said, leaping like a jackrabbit to be seen over the lean, six-foot-tall officer’s shoulder. 

“I understand you’re a vampire executioner by trade, and yet, you’ve been declared a human servant,” a balding, middle-aged reporter said, leaning around the same officer. “You’ve been anti-vampire in the past. Why the sudden change of heart?”

“Were you shot?” 

“What can you tell us about the recent string of assassination attempts?” 

“Enough!” Zerbrowski bellowed, silencing the crowd for about... four seconds before they began pelting me with questions. “We said no comment, people, and we mean it, so scram!” 

I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on my breathing. I retreated to the white, static-filled room I reserved for training or the hunt. That place where only the gun and I feel real. Everything else is there, muted and secondary until the time came to pull the trigger. It wasn’t ideal. I didn’t want to shoot these people. Not seriously, anyway. 

It did see me to the edge of the wrought-iron gates, though. Zerbrowski and I cleared the rippling press of bodies and stepped onto the winding asphalt drive that led up to the detached garage and its many luxury sports cars. The Aston Martin Vanquish rode like a dream. Difficult to have sex in the backseat, but Curtis and I had managed a time or two before his expulsion from the family. 

“Is she a good fuck?”

The question, asked in a purring contralto, made me swivel back to glare at the speaker. 

She was stunning, no doubt about that. Possibly the closest I’d seen a human woman come to Jeanette’s carefully cultivated beauty. Her hair was bound back in a long braid that swung to her waist. I was betting if she let it down, it would probably trail past her shapely behind. Her hair was so dark it shone blue in the right light. Her lips were a glossy scarlet, a contrast to the smooth alabaster of her skin. A belted dress in the same shade hit her at mid-thigh. The strappy heels showed she’d painted her nails to match the rest of the ensemble. I was sensing a theme here. 

Two men flanked her. One short, White, muscular, and blonde, the other thin and Black, with hair cut short in front and long in the back. Must be the style these days. They were all smiling at me like they knew a secret I didn’t. It was unnerving as hell and it pissed me off. 

“What did you fucking say to me?” 

“I asked if the Master of the City is a great lay. I’ve heard stories, but I’ve never had the pleasure of her company. So can you corroborate?” 

“No fucking comment,” I hissed. “And this is unprofessional. I want your name and the name of your employer.” 

I hated going White suburban mom in the middle of an investigation. But Jesus, where did she think she got off asking that? What rag did she write for that would send her to scoop that angle? Maybe if I threatened legal action against one, the rest would back off. Yeah, and soon I’d go ice fishing in hell. Probably not a good idea to get litigious, anyway. Judges didn’t seem to like me.

The reporter reached into her clutch purse and drew out a crisp business card. She offered it to me with a lazy, almost sensual smirk. 

“My name is Melanie and I’m with _Celebrity Aspect_. Feel free to call this number.” The smirk ticked up a notch. “Ask for Alejandro.” 

“I’m not bluffing,” I said, shoving the card into my pants pocket. 

I gave her one last warning look before jogging to catch up with Zerbrowski. He’d pulled a little ahead of me on the uphill incline, and I was breathing a little harder when I finally drew level with him. He’d just reached the veranda.

“You sure are popular, Blake,” he said mildly. 

“Jealous I’m the zombie queen at the monster ball?” I asked, fluttering my lashes at him. It felt good to tease in the face of what I’d been brought in to do. I felt more like myself when I was giving Zebrowski shit. 

“Always,” he said, flashing me a perfectly white smile. His eyes crinkled up at the corners for just a second before the light in his eyes dimmed again. “Ready to dance?” 

“Let’s boogie,” I muttered dryly. 

Zerbrowski opened the door, and we stepped inside.


	11. Chapter 11

The door swung open with nary a squeak, depositing us into an enormous foyer. The sheer size of it had been intimidating when I’d set foot in the Davis’ home for the first time. I’d been dressed in a nice, conservative blue swing dress I’d bought specially for the occasion. I’d clutched Curtis’ forearm so hard I’d bled him, even through the silk of his dress shirt. I’d been just twenty then, not even out of college yet. Excited, nervous, all a-flutter about my first love. 

Maybe it was the weariness talking, but it felt like a fucking eternity ago. 

From Zerbrowski’s reaction outside, I’d been expecting the entryway to be in shambles. It looked much like it had the first time I’d visited. The floor was white marble, accentuated with an Aalto inlay, as Eden had been eager to inform me. It was the Milan inlay, done in cool tones, to complement the royal blue carpet runner that stretched the length of the grand staircase. The sweeping lines drew the eye upward, toward the second floor, and the art hung on the walls. I could just make out a frame that held an obscenely expensive oil painting. An abstract piece that I could not, for the life of me, figure out the appeal of, no matter how long I stared at the stippled surface. 

Light from the raindrop chandelier reflected in the polished marble. Someone had cleaned recently. I wondered if Delores still worked on Thursdays. It’d said something about the family when the only person in the house I could stand besides Curtis was the sixty-something-year-old maid. 

An expensive scent lingered in the air, wafting to me on a breeze. It practically hissed, “Peasant,” as I walked by. A Ming Dynasty vase stood propped on one of their lacquered end tables. Zerbrowski gave it a somewhat speculative look when we passed. 

“Just how loaded were these guys?” 

“Guys?” I asked. “Was Walter killed as well?” 

The familiar address slipped out, and I could have slapped myself for it. Walter Davis was the more tolerable of the two, though he had the backbone of a jellyfish. A Moon Jellyfish that lacked any sting and mostly sat around until it was eaten. If he’d had an objection to his wife’s behavior, I’d never heard it. 

Zerbrowski didn’t comment on my slip. I knew he’d caught it. Zerbrowski was too good a cop not to observe a detail like that. I was too close to this case. So why had Zerbrowski and Dolph decided to involve me, regardless? Any self-respecting defense lawyer would take my involvement and use it to viciously shred this case. The legal system was almost designed to let the slippery and the unscrupulous worm their way out of trouble. It was never a matter of right or wrong; it was all about what you could prove. Reasonable doubt would allow the killer to go free. 

Of course, that was assuming this case made it to trial. If Dolph and Zebrowski were right, and a vampire had been the culprit, there was a chance this would never see the inside of a courtroom. Justified or not, the law still treated therianthropes and vampires like dangerous animals, who were better off dead than caged. Maybe it was cowardly of me, but I was sincerely hoping our culprit was a vampire. I’d seen enough courtrooms to last me the rest of the year. 

“Nope. The husband passed late last year. He just wasted away with no apparent cause. The autopsy didn’t show anything that could have caused it. There was an initial investigation into the death. We suspected a magical cause, but Tammy couldn’t get a lock on anything specific. It caused a minor scandal when she married the nineteen-year-old pool boy three months later.” 

“Classy,” I muttered. If the sarcasm got any thicker, I’d have been able to spread it on toast. “Real classy. That’s barely enough time for major decomposition on an embalmed body. What happened to the gold-digging pool boy?” 

“See for yourself. They’re in the dining room.”

Boy, did those words sound ominous. I had a fleeting urge to sprint out the door, away from whatever lay just off the foyer. My heart shimmied up into my throat, fluttery with panic like I’d swallowed a Death’s-Head. What horror would sear itself to the back of my eyelids tonight? Or worse still, what if the visual was cathartic? I wasn’t sure what sort of monster that would make me, but it would change the way I saw myself. I hated that, hated doubt. Things used to be so black and white.

I steeled myself, drawing in a few steadying breaths before I marched past Zerbrowski, through the pass-through, and into the dining room. 

The room’s curtains had been drawn, so it took my eyes around thirty seconds to adjust after standing so long in the wavering afternoon sun. When I could make out the shapes in the room, some tight knot inside me eased. Like the foyer, the dining room compared almost exactly to the memories I had of the place. They seemed sharp-edged at this moment. It was easy to dredge up the worst bits of your life. They stuck with you. 

A gilt-framed mirror hung just to the side of the intricately carved oak china hutch. A large French Country rug dominated the space, exposing only a thin strip of hardwood floor at the edges of the room. Oak, to match the hutch and the long trestle table in the center of the dining room. 

If she’d been alive to see it or care, Eden would have been apoplectic about the state of her French Country rug. Like almost everything else the Davis’ owned, it’d come with a hefty price tag. So far as Eden Davis was concerned, the only thing cheap that had ever been allowed in her home was me. 

The rug was vintage and bought as a celebration of her impeccable European ancestry. Mostly French and English, with just a touch of German. She’d been so damn proud of her genetic testing results. Not a drop of Native, Jewish, or Sub-Saharan African in her heritage. She was the epitome of WASP breeding. It should have been a red flag, but I’d been too blind to see it at the time. Would I have left Curtis if I’d known his family were racist assholes? No, probably not, but I would have saved myself the effort and presented the middle finger right away, instead of taking the heaping helping of passive-aggressive bullshit they’d ladled onto my plate.

The pattern on the rug was hard to see beneath the thick cake of dried blood. Sometime within the last twenty-four hours it had dried to a fine brown crust. If I stepped on it, I was sure the surface would crunch. With effort, I dragged my gaze up to the table and studied the shapes splayed out on the surface. 

The good news? My moral fiber remained more or less intact because I didn’t feel a sick sense of catharsis upon seeing the outline of Eden’s body. I didn’t feel much of anything, really. No hate, but also no remorse. It was just a fact of life now. The sky was blue. The Earth revolved around the sun. Eden Davis was dead. 

Maybe I’d feel differently when I saw her in vivid detail. I couldn’t tell much about the bodies from this angle. I’d need to get closer. 

I held a hand out wordlessly, and Zerbrowski produced a pair of booties and gloves without needing to be asked. He’d gone very still and quiet, watching me with wary eyes. I had no fucking idea where Dolph had wandered off to, so Zerbrowski was doing his best impression of the stoic police detective. He kept his expression neutral as I donned the protective gear and padded closer to the table. 

The bodies had been spread-eagled on the table, facing away from each other. There were about three feet of space between their heads. If they’d been tortured while alive, the other would be able to hear but not see it. Hearing the big, bad thing moving around you in the dark was always worse than seeing it. The human brain was a magnificent creature, able to cobble together a full picture from context clues. But the same mechanism that allowed us to become efficient problem solvers also worked against us. Imagining the horror that lurked in the dark was almost always worse than the reality. Our minds can be so terribly creative. 

I didn’t know the former pool boy’s name, and I didn’t ask. Using the title made it easier to distance myself from the corpse splayed on the table. It was easier to think of the body as an it, instead of a him. A pool boy instead of a Seth, Joel, or Bobby. Looking at him made it harder to hate what he and Eden had potentially done. His face was slack, eyes wide and unseeing. He looked so painfully young. Had he had a birthday since getting married? I didn’t know why, but it made it just one iota easier to stomach if I knew he’d been twenty. 

He belonged in a frat house chugging warm beer, not posed nearly nude on a dining room table. This kid had probably leaped at the chance to boff Eden, assured that if he did his job right, his sugar mama would take care of his pesky college debt. God, had he even gotten the chance to graduate? Scanning the body for clues made me feel like a sick voyeur. 

The only scrap of clothing left was the pair of silk boxers that strained against the front. Even dead and flaccid he looked impressive. Three guesses why Eden had offed her husband to marry the help. Most of his upper body had been nicely chiseled like he’d been a swimmer in life. He didn’t have the sort of bulk you got if you lifted serious weights, not that it would have done him a lot of good when going fist to fang with a vampire. 

His throat was gone, torn away so that only fleshy tatters kept his head attached to his neck. Something had gone at him like an animal. If there had been claw marks on the rest of his corpse, I’d have said a therian of some kind, but the damage was localized. The vampire had gone for the throat to make a swift and brutal kill, not to feed. I doubted they’d put him under before savaging this throat. He’d felt it when they tore away gobbets of his flesh. God help him. No one deserved this.

The scars on my collarbone and the bend of my elbow ached in sympathy. This had been done for the pure pleasure of it. Sadistic bastards. 

“You’re right. This is a pretty standard vampire kill. It either lost control or deliberately struck to kill. No claw marks to indicate a therianthrope, and too far away from any cemeteries for it to be an opportunistic ghoul. I don’t see why you needed me on this, Zerbrowski.” 

When I glanced up from the torn remains of the pool boy’s throat, Zerbrowski’s stare had settled just over my head. He wasn’t concerned about the pool boy. He only had eyes for Eden. 

“Check Mrs. Davis, Anita. You’ll see exactly why we called you.” 

There were ghosts swimming in Zerbrowski’s eyes. He wasn’t really looking at me, too focused on whatever memory assailed him. I didn’t want to go near Eden Davis when she was alive and I was even less eager to face her now that she was dead. How much worse could it be? 

It was the hard knot of fear and not the gentle prompting from Zerbrowski that drove me forward. I tripped over my own feet, stumbled, and almost sprawled against the table. The tips of my fingers and toes felt numb. Was it just the shock of the scene or something worse? Dr. Lillian had assured me I’d be fine after food and rest. Granted, the rest had been in short supply, but this had to be abnormal. 

I pushed through anyway. Obduracy, Jeanette would have said. Foolish, needless obduracy. Jeanette would never understand what prompted me to round the table and look at Eden’s corpse. It wasn’t a fascination with the macabre, a sense of pity, or even moral outrage that let me step over a bunched portion of the rug and face the body. 

It was respect for the victim. If the bad thing happened and I wasn’t there to put a stop to it, the least I could do was take a good, long gander at what was left behind. It didn’t matter who they’d been in life or what they’d done. No one deserved to be killed in the myriad ways I’d seen over the years. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to feel that same conviction staring down at Eden’s body. 

But I did. Even momentary spike of giddiness that accompanied the thought was doused in shame the moment I realized I was being self-congratulatory. Normal humans felt something when they saw things like this. _You’re not a sociopath. Congratulations for showing just a modicum of human decency._

The semi-opaque curtains kept most of the light off Eden’s face, with only a slim shaft of light illuminating the room. 

“Can I get a flashlight?” I asked. 

It was too damn dark in here. I could tell from the profile something was wrong with the face, I just couldn’t say what. Eden’s shadowy form almost looked lumpy, like someone had pulped the bones on the side I could vaguely see. Had she been beaten before she’d been drained? I could imagine she’d pissed people off in her life, but what could have warranted that kind of overkill? 

“Here,” an unknown, uniformed officer said, stepping forward to extend his flashlight to me. 

I took it with a muttered thanks and tried to smile at him. It evaporated almost the instant I slapped it on. I so wasn’t in the smiling mood. I pressed the bad of the light inward, and a flood of brilliant LED light washed over the corpse and threw the details into sharp relief. 

The first thing that registered were the bites. At least a half-dozen of them stood out against the stark whiteness of her skin. Corpses usually took on a grayish color as pallor mortis began to set in, generally fifteen to twenty minutes after brain death occurred. Not Eden. Even in death, she was lily-white, a fact that would have probably pleased her if she was around to appreciate it. I couldn’t sense a soul anywhere in the house, so I couldn’t exactly explain the bleak irony. 

“How long has she been dead?” I checked, running my fingers just inches above the bend of her elbow. 

There were several small bites one right after the other, like a kid sliding a corn cob down for the next tasty morsel. There was another bite further down, over the pulse point in the wrist. These impressions were deeper and made by an adult bite radius. Male or female, I couldn’t say. 

“Hard to tell. Eyewitness accounts say she arrived home in an Uber around ten o’clock and staggered into the house. Tipsy, you know. She’d brought a pair of men along with her. Probably our perps, but no one remembers their faces well enough to pick them out of a lineup. Go figure.” Zerbrowski rolled his eyes, and at last, some of his good humor came trickling back in. “The liver temp does us no good. The body is already adopting the ambient temperature, just like a vampire’s would.” 

I frowned up at him, confusion sponging away some of the stomach-cramping nausea that was threatening to bring up my quarter pounder with cheese. 

There were at least four distinctive sets of teeth marks on the body. A victim couldn’t rise a vampire with more than two bites from different vampires at the time of turning. Hell, even then it was dicey. Most of the time the body rejected multiple vampiric infections and on the off chance the bodies rose, there was no one home. Animalistic vampires were only marginally smarter than flesh-eating zombies and just as intent on making a kill.

Zerbrowski only stared back, expressionless. He was a fine understudy for Dolph in a pinch. With few options, I returned my focus to the corpse, guiding the solid shaft of light up toward the face. What I saw drove me an involuntary step back. 

Zerbrowski’s initial description had been spot on. Deformed didn’t even begin to cover it. The bones in Eden’s face seemed to be migrating, even as I watched. Her face seemed flatter, the cheekbones more prominent, the brow ridge standing out like a jutting cliff over her eyes. Was it just me, or did they seem more deeply set than before? Her lips were pulled back from her teeth, trapped in a forever scream she’d never get to voice. It gave me a good look at new, shovel-shaped teeth and an abnormally large set of fangs budding between the bicuspids.

Something about the sight tickled a memory. There was something familiar about the shape of the head, those teeth. What the hell was it? 

It took longer than I’d have liked to track down the memory. I’d done most of the work on a group project in college that theorized what ancient vampires would have been like. Did earlier versions of the vampiric virus give the victim nigh immortality, or was that simply a mutation of its newest form? It would explain there were no bloodsucking _Australopithecus_ strolling down main street. We'd found skeletons galore, but we’d never had proof any vampires over a few thousand years old were still living...or rather undead.

Until now. 

“I’ll be damned,” I breathed. “It’s a case of vampiric atavism.”

“Ata-what?” 

“Atavism. It’s a modification of a biological structure whereby an ancestral genetic trait reappears after having been thought lost through evolutionary change. It can occur for different reasons. Sometimes the phenotypes are preserved in DNA and re-express through a mutation that overrides new traits.”

“Oh yeah, baby, talk nerdy to me,” Zerbrowski said with a smirk. “Dolph owes me a fifty. I told him you’d figure out what was going on. Care to dumb things down though? I want to explain to Dolph in person. See if the vein in his forehead twitches.” 

“The vampire behind the attacks isn’t a homo sapien. It’s a previous generation of humanoid, probably _homo erectus_ or _homo habilis_. Which means that these victims have been infected with an ancient form of the vampire virus. It’s probably safe to assume they won’t act or think like _homo sapiens_ when the change is through. If they keep any higher brain function at all. They might just turn into _prehistoric_ animalistic vampires.” 

“Jesus. You’re saying that they’re turning into cavemen?” 

“The stereotypical image of a caveman is actually derived from _homo neanderthalensis_ , not _erectus_. And the stereotypes are unfair. Neanderthals actually had a slightly larger brain capacity than homo sapiens. The general belief is that _homo sapiens_ ‘ cerebellums-“ 

“Anita,” Zerbrowski snapped, cutting across me mid-lecture. “Break it down. What does that mean for us, Anita?” 

I stared down at Eden’s still shifting bone structure, the oversized fangs, and shuddered as the real danger finally began to seep into my poor, battered psyche. 

Vampires only grew more powerful with age. At just over six hundred, Jeanette was already scarier than I liked to contemplate most days. Nikolaos, the oldest vampire I’d ever had the displeasure to meet, had been only a little over a thousand, and she’d scared the fucking shit out of me. This vampire was a _homo erectus_ or _homo habilis_. Which meant it had been turned sometime during the Pliocene Epoch. Maybe earlier. Which made it anywhere from two to five _million_ years old.

Good fucking God. What the hell could we do to stop it? Was there any stopping it?

I wished I had a good answer.

"I don't know, Zerbrowski. I really don't know."


	12. Chapter 12

Dolph’s jaw worked hard, teeth mashing together like he was trying to grind down glass. I thought I’d seen him angry the last time we’d worked a case together. I’d been wrong. He’d been pissed. 

Now he was _furious._

His eyes never left mine, even as Zebrowski paraphrased my theory. Atavism for dummies, as he’d cheerfully put it. Though he’d never gotten a specialized education in the preternatural, I was certain he grasped the finer points. Zerbrowski’s cheerful, class clown facade was carefully cultivated to disarm suspects. Beneath the veneer of buffoonery lay a shrewd thinker. After our first case together, I’d never made the mistake of underestimating him. 

Dolph had been hunched over the coffee table, shuffling through sheaves of paper when we’d entered the room. What had appeared at first glance to be an oversized KJV bible was in fact just a shell to house Humans First rhetoric. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me to learn Eden was a charter member of Humans Against Vampires’ new, violent splinter group, but it did. 

I shifted a pamphlet to stare at a diagram sketched on thin paper that had been cut from butcher’s block paper roll. 

“Are these instructions?”

Dolph barely inclined his head in answer. “Plans to create cross-shaped, silver-alloy, priest-blessed buckshot. The shot will probably deform when it hits the vampire, but going in it’ll be cross-shaped. Pretty damn effective. There are diffusers above every door that contain a mixture of silver nitrate and holy water. All the screens on the windows appear to be made of silver-steel alloy, the paint in the house seems specially mixed to include a high silver content despite the myriad health code violations, and every light on the exterior of the house is UV. Not enough to burn a vampire to a crisp, but enough to convince them to try another home. This place is loaded for bear against the undead.”

I almost corrected him. There was more than one sort of undead. The defenses would do jack shit against a zombie, a dybbuk, or a draugr. I let it go because I couldn’t afford to get into a pissing match with Dolph. Not if I wanted to keep this consultancy job. They still needed my expertise. I was sure someone would have made the connection eventually, but how many more would have been killed in the meantime?

“Where’d they get the steel-silver alloy?” I muttered, more to myself than to Dolph. “It’s been limited to military and police use in the last few years, hasn’t it? You can only buy it in limited quantities, like pseudoephedrine or batteries.” 

Though the legalization of vampires hadn’t been the only reason for the limited civilian access. In the 20th century, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, China, Australia, Chile, Poland, and Serbia had had Silver Rushes, their equivalent to our Gold Rush. Because silver was valuable for protection against any number of creepy crawlies, it was astronomically expensive for a time. That was until the alchemists emerged on the scene. 

For years, alchemy had been a debunked science. No human, no matter how psychically gifted, could transform base metals into silver or gold. They’d been right. Humans couldn’t. Faeries _could_. Masquerading as human psychics through glamor, they’d revenged themselves on the human populous. We’d hunted their people nearly to extinction by 1918. In 1929, they tried to tear the world economy down around its ears, flooding the market with precious metals, depreciating currency, causing the greatest market crash in the history of the United States and Europe. Even though we’d eventually managed to recover, things had never quite been the same. 

The Sidhe had been eradicated after the plot was discovered. The only faeries left, so far as anyone knew, were the lesser castes. More animal than human, and rarely a bother.

Any children with traces of _Homo Arcanus_ DNA in their ancestry were put on a government watch list. Changelings almost never rose above the level of mildly psychic and certainly couldn’t use glamor without appealing to a higher power. Occasionally there were exceptions, and any found with the talent for alchemy were immediately scooped up by the U.S. government for use in weapons manufacturing. Within a few decades, most military and police outfits had been outfitted with steel-silver alloy. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives every year, but I still had to wonder about the fate of those alchemists. Were they happy with their lot? Taken care of? Or were they chained in a basement somewhere, churning out silver by the bar? 

Dolph’s impressive shoulder spread heaved upward as he gave a noncommittal shrug. He was one of the largest men I’d ever seen, though my boss Bert could have given him a run for his money. Standing at an impressive 6’8” he was not a man to cross lightly. This close, I could see the muscles of his arms strain at the suit jacket. His knuckles threatened to split the latex gloves he wore. There was no tremor in his hands, but the barely restrained aura of violence around him, the utter contempt on his face as he stared at me, told me he was just spoiling for a fight. 

“They wanted to be prepared. I can’t blame them for that.” 

“This shit is illegal,” I countered. “Doesn’t that mean anything at all?”

“Vampires should have remained illegal,” he muttered. “There’s been more vampire on human crime than ever before. Everything was fine before Addison v Clark fucked the system up. Things were better when we were separate.” 

“Separate but equal, huh? How very 1890s of you.”

There was a flinching around Dolph’s eyes at that, and then his gaze darted around the room, locking on each crime scene tech and uniformed officer for a moment to see if they’d react to the statement. Mostly people kept their heads down, sensing a shit storm brewing and wisely staying the hell out of it.

“That’s not fair and you know it. I don’t have a problem with race-mixing, Anita. I have a problem with vampires getting away with whatever they goddamn please thanks to these newfound rights.”

Dolph was usually a man of few words. The fact he’d strung together multiple multisyllabic sentences was a testament to just how pissed he was.

“So it’s better to go back to the days just after Roosevelt’s law passed?” I shot back. “When vampires could be killed for just walking down the street? When shooting a person you just _thought_ was a vampire could earn you manslaughter instead of a murder charge? How many people went free or had reduced sentences because of bigotry like that, huh?” 

Dolph’s fist came down hard, impacting the coffee table with a crack. The sound echoed through the room like a shot, and every paper on the coffee table flew into the air. 

“Goddamnit, Anita! Has she brainwashed you already? You used to see our side of things! You’re a vampire executioner, for God’s sake. You’re state-appointed to kill them!” 

“The ones who break the law, Dolph! And because there aren’t many other options. Did you know a bill was proposed to take their eyes and tongues with holy water, just to be sure they wouldn’t grow back? And after that, they’d have their teeth removed surgically and have to feed from a drip like a goddamn hamster for the rest of their eternity? It didn’t pass, but the fact it’s the only other option makes me sick. A stake through the heart has a bit more dignity, wouldn’t you agree?” 

“You think of them as people, don’t you?” he sneered. 

I hadn’t, for a long time. I hadn’t met many until I’d moved to Saint Louis. None of my experiences afterward had left me with positive impressions of the fanged among us. I still wasn’t quite sure how I felt about them if I was being honest. Their system of government was fucked, their priorities absurd, and Jeanette’s idea of protection frankly scared me. 

All I really knew was that Dolph’s attitude was pissing me off. 

“Some of them,” I said finally. “The ones who earn it.” 

Dolph acted like he hadn’t even heard me. He seemed to stare through me, faint nausea etching the lines of his face. 

“You’re fucking her, aren’t you?” he said very quietly, voice barely rising above a whisper. “I saw that video. It’s why you gave her blood. You’ll do whatever she asks.” 

My fists shook, and every muscle in my body ached from the strain of holding myself in check. Fury reigned in my head, my pulse pounding like a war drum against my temples. I could taste the tang of blood in my mouth and dimly realized I’d bitten my tongue in an effort not to scream a long stream of obscenities at him. 

Zerbrowski had moved to intercept me as if he expected me to launch myself across the space and go for Dolph’s throat. I didn’t make a move toward the Sergeant. He was looking for any excuse to throw me into a cell for a while. That distant look on his face convinced me that there was some reason behind his petty bullshit. I wasn’t sure who he was really pissed at, but I wasn’t in the mood to take the flogging for it. 

“Fuck this shit,” I hissed. “I lost forty percent blood volume yesterday. I have had a transfusion, and I am supposed to be at home taking a fucking nap. I came because Zerbrowski swallowed his pride and asked me to take a look. You’re gambling with the human lives you claim to care about by keeping me at arm’s length. If you’d come to me after the first, maybe I could have helped save the victims. You wanted me gone more than you wanted them safe. Well, congratu-fucking-lations, Sergeant. When this is through, I quit.”

“Anita-“ Zerbrowski began, slightly panicked. 

I held a hand up, shushing him. “I mean it. After this case is done, I’m not consulting for Saint Louis PD until I get a fucking sincere apology from Dolph. I’m going to pass out when I get home and you can call me when Eden rises. I’ll want to see the vampires you’ve captured.” 

I turned on one heel and stalked out of the room, bootie-clad feet barely making any noise on the hardwood. Harder to get catharsis when you couldn’t stomp your way out and slam the door. When I emerged into the foyer, they were loading the bodies into bags to be transported...wherever they were being held. The pool boy’s bag was already zipped shut, and Eden was being carefully loaded into hers. Rigor should have been in full effect by now, but she was as limp as a rag doll. 

Or rather...she had been. 

As I watched, her fingers twitched. Rapid eye movement made the eyelids flicker. A soft moan rose from her throat. Oh God. This was wrong. So very, very wrong. We still had hours yet until sundown! Even if these victims were turning fast, they shouldn’t have been rising during the day! 

I had my hand on my Browning before I could think, staring aghast as the impossible happened. 

Eden Davis opened her huge baby blues, blinked up at the nice crime scene tech holding her, and bared her teeth before lunging forward, tearing into his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if the silver issue has been addressed in the series canon and if is, then I've just taken a different tack on it. Someone commented on A_Sporking_Rat's chapter-by-chapter reviews of Skin Trade, Flirt, Bullet, Hit List, and Kiss the Dead, though I can't remember which one of them it was, that silver should be a really precious resource in this universe. Everyone has always known about vampires, therians, and at least some of their weaknesses. It would make sense it might even be more valuable than gold. It would probably have been pretty heavily mined. So I came up with an explanation for why it would still be so commonplace even in Anita's day.


	13. Chapter 13

There was a frozen half-second where no one moved. We waited in that space where not even breath stirred the silence. 

Then the tech let out a cry. If anyone had been making a peep, it wouldn’t have been audible. Eden’s jaws clamped tightly around his throat, cutting off most of his air. The sound came out thick and gurgling, a fine spray of red spittle spouting from his lips as Eden rode him to the ground. His head hit the marble floor so hard that the crack echoed through the foyer like a shotgun blast. Gore fanned out around his head like a starburst, staining the Aalto inlay scarlet. 

The sound cut through us and everyone was suddenly in motion, some turning to wheel away from the scene light startled birds. Most converged on Eden and the fallen tech, weapons drawn.

“Don’t shoot!” a frantic young man said, stepping between Dolph and the tech. They were both in the way of my shot, damn it. I could barely see what was going on through the throng of jostling bodies. “Don’t shoot! You’ll hit James!” 

I didn’t bother to tell the tech that James was as good as dead. If the traumatic brain injury hadn’t killed him, blood loss would. Eden had lunged for James’ carotid, splitting the artery wide open with her teeth. Seasoned vampires knew to drink from the vein. The low pressure in the veins meant that external pressure could be used to staunch bleeding until a clot formed. A small prick with a needle or fangs wouldn’t kill someone unless they were drained. Even injured, Jeanette hadn’t lunged for an artery, though she could have. The brachial artery ran the length of the upper arm. 

Arteries were a different beast altogether. The pressure was high, and a cut would send blood spurting everywhere like a severed hose. A nicked artery could kill you in minutes. Completely severed? Less. A lot less. I sincerely hoped the blow had killed him or rendered him senseless. Dying as I choked on my own blood had been a semi-frequent nightmare of mine, and a fucking dismal reality for many of the victims I staked in morgues.

“Out of the way!” I shouted, shouldering past two of the crime scene techs. “There’s a panic room on the second floor, get to it!” 

At least, they’d been installing one on the second floor when I’d last heard. Something about a half-breed zombie freak with a grudge had them on edge. Like I’d ever have sent zombies for Eden. Even zombies had limits on what they’d eat. 

I’d just have to believe they’d finished construction in the last three years. At the very least, it would get the milling crowd of potential victims out of Eden’s path. I’d seen videos of animalistic vampires, but I’d never dealt with one in person. They were just too damn rare to predict. Ordinarily, I’d have assumed it had all the weaknesses of a standard vampire, but now even that was in question. Had the vampiric strain in Homo Erectus been sensitive to faith, silver, or sunlight?

A plan, slapdash as it was, formed in my head. The techs and at least one consultant turned from the grisly scene en masse and thundered up the stairs, leaving a ring of officers around James’ prone form and the ever-shifting Eden. She was grappling with a female officer, reducing her forearm to the consistency of hamburger. If she survived, she’d be shunted to a desk job. That sort of injury could incapacitate your shooting arm forever. I knew from firsthand experience. If it hadn’t been for serious physical therapy and lucky placement, I’d have been out of the game years ago. 

Clive Perry, a slender young black man and one of the newest detectives on the team, was doing his best to line up a shot, but couldn’t quite manage it without shooting his fellow rookie. I couldn’t recall her name, which seemed wrong somehow. I didn’t think it was impossible to save her life, but if she was about to die, the least I could do was remember her name. We’d been introduced just before the District Serial Case when Dolph had been breaking in the fresh meat. Most were psychically gifted, in keeping with new federal mandates that incentivized police departments to hire people with preternatural abilities. Vampires and weres were still a long way from being welcomed by the police, but psychics were now getting a fair shake. 

She hadn’t made much of an impression on me. I just remembered thinking her name was common. One of those names you’d hear two or three times during roll call in elementary school, and a strange juxtaposition to her Gaelic surname. Jane? Jennifer? Jessica? 

It didn’t matter. The trick was getting Eden off of her. 

What I was about to attempt shouldn’t work on a vampire. Unlike most other undead, vampires held onto a lot of higher brain function. I hoped that, as an animalistic vampire, she’d respond more like a zombie or ghoul. 

I centered myself, took a deep breath, and tried to relax as much as I could under the circumstances. I finally allowed the hard clench of power to ease out of me, spilling across the room toward Eden like a wind from the grave. I felt it sweep past the semi-circle of detectives, touching each of them and shedding off their living flesh like dew. There were dead parts on their bodies, yes, and I had some sense I could have limited control over that if I tried. Several of the detectives shuddered as the power touched them. Even Zerbrowski reacted. He twitched, like a cloud of flies had settled briefly on his skin and he could shake them off. It appeared my unofficial partner was more psychic than the tests let on. 

When my power met Eden it spread across the clammy, distorted shape, and clung like hoarfrost. The connection was tentative, but there. Good. I reached out with my animating ability and did what I’d never allowed myself to do in real life.

I drove my power into the side of her face like a vicious right hook, literally snapping her head sideways with the force of the psychic blow. She reared back from the fallen Detective. It was just enough of a reprieve that Detective Perry, Zerbrowski, and Dolph squeezed off a few rounds, blowing holes the size of wine corks into her arms, stomach, and neck respectively.

While impressive, none of the shots pulped her head or heart. She staggered upright, mouth ringed with gore, baring her absurdly large fangs at Zerbrowski, giving voice to a truly hair-raising bellow of challenge. It was the guttural, utterly inhuman warning sound of an apex predator. How the hell did human vocal cords even manage that without tearing themselves apart? 

Eden’s eyes locked on mine, and a sharp pang of unexpected, illogical grief twisted just under my ribs. It was like looking in the windows of an empty house. Sad and just a little haunting. Eden Davis wasn’t in there, and she never would be again. There was no recovery for an animalistic vampire, no way to pull through and restore her sanity. The only peace she could find was at the business end of a shotgun. 

“C’mon, Eden. Come and get it,” I coaxed, digging my nails hard into my palm, drawing scarlet half-moons onto my skin. It wasn’t much blood, especially compared to the gouts of the stuff still running from the female detective’s arm, but with my power riding her, I thought it might be enough.

Eden vaulted over the detective’s body, dodging the hail of bullets, and used her lacquered end table as a springboard, smashing both the table and Ming Dynasty vase as she went. 

I seized my kit, turned, and pelted down the adjacent hall toward my target before Eden’s bare feet could slap the marble behind me. 

_Please, God, don’t let there be a complete remodel._

If the Davis’ had changed the layout of the house, I was fucked. 

Most of the bedrooms, including Curtis’, were on the second floor. The ground floor comprised the foyer, dining room, den, a bathroom, and, at the very end of this hall, Eden’s leisure room, or the hobby of the month room, as Curtis often called it. Over the years, Eden had collected hobbies, trying to fill the empty afternoons with embroidery, exercise, scrapbooking, sculpture, and about a dozen more transitory interests. One of the longest-lived obsessions had been a love affair with horticulture, transforming the only bedroom on this floor into a sunroom to accommodate the recent interest. Here was hoping the floor-to-ceiling glass windows were still intact and flooding the room with the searing afternoon sunlight. 

The pictures on the wall trembled as I thundered past. A dozen smiling Curtis’ beamed down at me, some holding trophies and diploma, some standing shoulder to shoulder with Eden and Walter. Most of them were of a younger, gap-toothed version of their son before he’d dared to cut the apron strings and date women his mother hadn’t pre-selected. I thought she liked to remember him that way. Her perfect little boy, too smart and too good to fall for some evil, ethnic Jezebel. 

God, I wished that was an exaggeration. She’d shouted that over the phone during Curtis’ last interaction with her, loud enough that I could hear it through the cell phone speakers all the way across the room. And that was the nicest thing she’d called me. She had an impressive arsenal of slurs at her disposal.

My kit bounced as I moved, slamming down painfully into my ribs with each stride. The sunroom was just ahead. Six feet. Four. 

Eden’s footfalls sounded in the hall, faster and heavier than my own. When I craned my neck to look behind me, I found her only a few feet back, moving at terrifying speed. Everything about her seemed wrong, from the vacant eyes to the shifty way she moved. It was ungainly, and off-tempo, like a dancer who couldn’t follow a beat. It was pure, distilled, uncanny valley, close enough to human that the differences were fucking terrifying. Just the glance sent a burst of adrenaline slamming through my veins, pushing my heart to a frenzied gallop. 

Two feet. One.

Eden’s fingers raked at my back, catching a handful of curls that had come loose from the messy bun I ordinarily kept my curls in. Buns, braids, or hidden beneath caps, always when you were going into a fight. Long, loose hair was a handhold for the enemy to use. Never make it easy. It was a lucky shot, probability falling with ruthless pragmatism on who it may. 

Eden’s fingers dug in and jerked my head to the side, sending a sharp, twisting pain up my spine. The aim had no doubt been to bare my throat in a long, pale line, but all the vampire succeeded in doing was wrenching a fistful of hair from my scalp. A pained yelp escaped me, and I barely had the presence of mind to lurch through the doorway into the sunroom. 

Squares of light stretched the length of the sunroom carpet, warming it to the touch. I hit the carpet, taking most of the impact on my shoulders as I rolled to my feet, crossing most of the room with that single move, pressing my back against one of the glass-paneled walls as I climbed to my feet. The kit had battered me the whole way through, the sharp edges like fingers jabbed between my ribs. I was about to have a score of new bruises. 

The vampire stalked into the room but balked as it hit the edge of the sunlit floor as if it had encountered an impenetrable stone wall. My power still clung to her, a cracked glaze of ice clinging to her metaphysical presence. Frustration boiled off of her, cracking through the lure of power, the insatiable hunger. I could feel it like an alien whisper in my head. The siren’s call of blood, the need to tear my fingers into warm flesh and come away with thick globules of the stuff, quivering and so very, very alive. It would be bliss. The wash of sunlight felt like standing near the open mouth of a kiln, a heat too great to survive. 

That moment of mute, frustrated hesitation was the opening I needed. My hands were digging into the innards of the kit before I was even conscious of the moment, lifting my legal shotgun free of the bag. 

It was one of those crystalline moments. Every detail sharp, like a layer of grime had been scraped away from my eyes, allowing me to see clearly. There was no sound save the white noise that came when I killed. A perfect, far-away place where only necessity existed. There’d be consequences outside of this soundless bubble when emotion seemed back in. But not now. The stock of the shotgun snugged firmly against my shoulder, a welcome weight. Warmth radiated at my back, a halo of golden sunlight to keep the vampire at bay. 

My finger flexed on the trigger. The shotgun bucked. Eden’s head disappeared in a spray of red blood and white bone fragments. The body twitched for a few seconds after, waiting for electrical signals that weren’t coming. Then it, too, collapsed. 

I sagged to my knees, sliding audibly down the glass, shotgun still clutched in my hands. They’d gone limp, so I was holding the shotgun across my lap. The first, hiccuping sob caught me by surprise, tearing itself free of my chest painfully. The one that followed it hurt almost as much. My eyes burned, my body ached, and I couldn’t stop the sudden influx of tears. 

I’d hated Eden Davis. I’d fantasized about wringing her neck or shooting her many times over the years. Now she was dead, and the corrosive feeling still ate my insides, boring holes into me. Killing her hadn’t made a damn bit of difference. 

Napoleon Bonaparte once said vengeance had no foresight. Nelson Mandela had said hatred is like drinking poison and then waiting for it to kill your enemy. They’d both been right. I felt sick. This wasn’t what I’d wanted. All I’d wanted was an acknowledgment of my humanity. At heart, I was still a girl trying to prove herself, falling short of another parent’s expectation. How fucking sad. I’d never find what I was looking for. Eden was dead and gone, just like my mother. As indifferent to my suffering as my father and step-mother.

The sickness ate at me until I thought I might throw up. When the others found me curled in on myself, still sobbing, I claimed Eden had scored a hit to my stomach. The truth just sounded pathetic. I allowed a very sober Zerbrowski to escort me to the waiting ambulance. He knew I was lying and didn’t call me on it. The guy code meant you didn’t ask unless someone else brought it up. But he offered me his shoulder as the paramedics looked me over, allowing me to turn my face into his coat to hide the tears. 

“Thank you,” I whispered. 

Zerbrowski took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “What are friends for?”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: Mentions of rape, abuse, allusions to sexual abuse, some sexual content.

Almost everything television sells you about police investigation is a crock of shit. DNA analysis takes more than a day, IAFIS won’t immediately churn out a print match, and state Orders of Execution take time. Often it depended on how well the affidavit and application were written. I was certain that the Order of Execution would remain in legal limbo until we had a name to put with our alleged ancient vampire. 

It was going to be a hard sell, no matter how lenient the judge. The curriculum in our schools was outdated, fueling fundamental misunderstandings about most non-human beings. Even I’d gone into college with faulty information and had to unlearn some of my previously held assumptions. From grade school on, they taught us the oldest living vampires were only a few thousand years old. Staggeringly ancient to most modern people, but it wasn’t even a speck on the dusty face of history if you knew a lick about the evolution of the species. 

We needed a warrant to kill the bastard behind all this, and for that, I needed someone to lend credence to the theory. I’d look at the other captured vamps when the doctor cleared me for action. The hospital staff hadn’t believed me when I’d promised to behave myself. Shame people were so cynical these days. It meant that for the next few days at least, I was limited to flexing only metaphysical muscle. I’d bruised my ribs during the chase and still suffering the ill-effects of blood loss. 

Zerbrowski had informed the others the blood loss had been behind the shakes and hysterics, so I hadn’t gotten much shit for my emotional outburst. No one was really in the mood to hand out a ribbing after what had gone down at the Davis’ house. James Evers, the crime scene tech, had died instantly when his brains splattered on the marble. Jessica Arnet wasn’t so lucky. She was still in surgery, with the vain hope they could preserve her arm. Best-case scenario, she’d have limited mobility. At worst, she was looking at amputation. 

The vampire behind this was going to regret coming to my town and hurting my people. When I had the warrant, they were going to wish they’d run when they had the chance. But to get the warrant, I needed an expert to back my theory. 

I leaned my back against the cool stone, dragging in deep lungfuls of the chill evening air gratefully. I’ve never liked being in hospitals, with the needles, constantly shifting staff, and burning antiseptic smell. There’d been a reason I’d gone in for preternatural biology instead of neurobiology or medical biotechnology. Too sterile, too detached. I wanted to be in the thick of the action, not sequestered in a lab. 

A few other detectives had superficial injuries, but everyone had turned out for Jessica Arnet. When there was an officer down, all units responded. The waiting room was full to bursting, and when she was finally wheeled to a room, there’d be a line of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives keeping watch over her. I’d excused myself to make this call, but I’d be keeping vigil as long as the doctor would allow. They had ordered me to get some sleep and return to work tomorrow if I felt like it. 

Fat chance. As Jeanette’s human servant, I was a target for this mysterious hitter. If they blew my head off, they’d drag her down with me. I wasn’t dragging my dangerous problems with me to work. Bert was basking in the media attention and handily making up for lost profits. The national broadcast had made me a household name and put Animators Inc in the spotlight. Bert was just fucking thrilled by the news coverage. To me, it was a nightmare come true. Everyone knew my name, knew my face, and knew I was involved with the Master of Saint Louis. We had a ship name already, for fuck’s sake. Jeanita. Blech. 

Still grimacing, I tugged my phone free of my pants pocket and selected a number from my contacts. Japan was fourteen hours ahead of Central Standard Time, but the woman on the other end of the line didn’t sound groggy when she answered. 

“Dr. Georgia Hale speaking. May I ask who’s calling?” 

“Hey, Dr. Hale. It’s Anita Blake. Is this a bad time?” 

Dr. Hale was a forensic anthropologist and currently classed as the world’s most powerful animator. I was lagging just behind her, moving up a few slots to rest in third. I was sure her word would do more to sway a judge than mine.

We’d been keeping in touch via email since our last meeting. Dr. Hale had been in town, conducting a lecture at Barnett On Washington when she’d been attacked by a horde of zombies, dispatched by a necromancer named Dominga Salvador. I’d met a lot of monsters in the last three years, but Dominga Salvador had placed second in on my list of scariest motherfuckers I’d had the misfortune to cross. Her life’s goal had been to kill necromancers in order to go toe to toe with the biggest, baddest monster of them all—the Mother of All Darkness. 

Dr. Hale’s tone was just a little brighter when she answered, “No, not at all. What can I help you with?” 

“I’ve got a favor to ask if you can spare the time. I know you’re in the midst of sorting out the Gashadokuro that appeared in Sakai. If you can’t fly out, I could send you footage.” 

Her enthusiasm dimmed and when she spoke again, her voice was detached, an observer soaking in facts, rather than a woman having a friendly conversation. 

“The bones that made up the Gashadokuro have been sifted through, and I’ve reconstructed most of the individual corpses. After this, it’s out of my hands. What’s wrong?”

I explained my theory, repeating the facts as I knew them in a dry, no-nonsense manner. I stopped shy of Eden’s resurrection and rampage. Though Dr. Hale had studied disinterred corpses that had died in agonizing ways, she wasn’t really equipped to deal with violence. She was an adult woman, and it felt wrong to coddle her like this, but I’d grown to like her. We had a lot in common and I felt irrationally protective where she was concerned. Was this what it felt like to have a sister you could actually stand? 

“That is fascinating!” she enthused, the cheerful note in her voice back in force. She was ecstatic. You’d have thought I’d presented her with a puppy. “If your theory is correct, it opens up a world of possibilities! An actual _Homo Erectus_ vampire could put an end to most scientific conjecture about the strain. Think of all the things we could learn. The daily routines, their diets, their culture! Genetic testing could pinpoint where the current strain diverged and spread to homo sapiens.“

“Sure,” I agreed, fisting a hand guiltily into the fabric of Zerbrowski’s coat. Mine had been splashed with Eden’s blood and gray matter. 

I didn’t have the heart to tell Dr. Hale the hard truth. I was going to kill this vampire, scientific advancement be damned. They were creating a small army of berserkers. They had to be stopped at all costs. 

Dr. Hale stayed on the line as she booked the next available flight. She’d be landing at St. Louis Lambert International Airport as early as tomorrow afternoon. She thanked me profusely for calling and hung up, off to pack, dreaming of the grand anthropological possibilities. 

I rarely envied smokers, but at times like these, I wished I had a simple vice to blunt the feeling for a few minutes. 

Twenty-four hours. One revolution of the earth. That was all it had taken to flip my life upside down all over again. There was a conspiracy to drag down the vampire council, a possible Horseman gunning for us, and a prehistoric vampire that appeared to be targeting Humans First members. I didn’t have enough pieces of the clusterfuck picture to begin to guess what we were dealing with.

Jeanette had warned me there was a new vampire passing through. Could it be our mysterious Homo Erectus? It seemed unlikely. Surely Jeanette would have sensed something that old. I needed to speak to her. So, with another grimace, I dialed her personal number. It went to voicemail. I tried again, with the same result. I tried Iniquity next, then Paramour, and Danse Macabre. Nothing. She hadn’t come into work or called to let anyone know where she’d be. 

My nerves stretched taut, anxiety stealing my breath for a second until my rational mind caught up with the facts. Jeanette wasn’t dead. If I reached for the connection it was there, solid and thrumming with cold power. She was alive, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was well. I couldn’t imagine anything getting through the phalanx of guards Claudia had no doubt installed around Jeanette. Maybe she was in a safe house, cut off from conventional means of communication? 

Remaining ignorant wasn’t an option. I couldn’t stomach it. 

I reached for that cool power, the tether that pulled us inexorably together, a pair of binary stars locked into each other’s orbit. I plucked it like a harp string, the vibration shivering across the length of the tether, accompanied by my hesitant thought. Could she even hear me at this distance? 

_“Jeanette?”_

_“I am here, ma petite.”_

Breath left me in a painful burst. She was alive. But...her shields were drawn tight, like an opaque screen keeping me from her. Malcolm had described the connection like peering in on one another through a window. I would be able to see her, and she would be able to see me if the connection was open between us. She was locked down, betraying nothing. Why? 

The backlog of questions I’d been preparing since waking in the clinic jostled to the forefront of my mind, each eager to be voiced. Then an impulsive little intruder cut in line, blurting the pressing question without my conscious permission. 

_“What’s wrong? Why are you shielding?”_

I sensed, rather than saw, her shift uncomfortably. Sensation was bleeding through. Aches and pains that weren’t mine piled onto me, an order of magnitude worse than what I’d suffered at Eden’s hands. Bruises that ached right down to the bone, lacerations that burned at the edges as the skin knitted together. My mouth felt swollen, my neck scraped raw, a hideously painful ache in my core. 

It tore a gasp from my throat. It felt like someone had kicked the shit out of me in the handful of seconds her shields slipped. I was immediately on edge again. Adrenaline slammed hard through my veins, priming my muscles to fight or sprint in the other direction. Something had hurt Jeanette badly. 

_“What happened? Tell me where you are. I’m coming.”_

I was already cataloging what I’d need and who’d be trustworthy enough to come with me. Jeanette’s sigh breezed through my mind. 

_“It is over, ma petite. I am in no immediate danger.”_

_“Bullshit. Tell me where you are or, at the very least, let me see you.”_

_“I fear that would make you uncomfortable."_

Seeing her beaten all to hell? Yeah, it’d probably make me uncomfortable, but I needed to know, damn it. I couldn’t help her if I didn’t know where she was and what had happened. Maybe the surroundings would give me some idea where she was. 

Jeanette sighed once more. _“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”_

Then the shields crumbled, an enormous weight of exhaustion bowing my shoulders as she did so. Jeanette had been holding them tight for hours, keeping me out since sundown. The aches piled onto me again, and this time, I had a visual to match them to, though it wasn’t the thing that immediately caught my attention. 

Jeanette was reclining in a truly enormous tub, curled into a corner, as though she were afraid to take up too much space. She looked smaller than I’d ever seen before, like a fluffy dog that had been hosed down to reveal the lean body beneath. Her breasts and slim shoulders and head were the only things visible above the steaming water, but it was enough. 

A bite mark stood out starkly on the swell of one pale breast. Bruises mottled her upper arms, and her neck looked like it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. Her lips were swollen, and a yellow-green bruise shadowed her jaw. All the injuries looked a few days old, already healing, even though they had to have been inflicted in the last few hours. 

I was stunned into silence, my breath caught in my throat again. The last time I’d seen a visual like this, Dolph had been escorting a woman away from a scene. She’d pumped her wereanimal lover full of silver not long after he’d beaten her. The heat began somewhere around my toes and swept up my body, setting every nerve buzzing with incandescent rage. 

The aches weren’t just on her skin. They were inside too, which could only mean one thing.

_“Who?”_ I demanded. _“Tell me who did it. I’ll kill them.”_

_“It does not matter, ma petite.”_

_“The hell it doesn’t!”_

_“It was a necessity. Do you remember what I told you about my role in Nikolaos’ regime?”_

I did. She’d confessed to being an incentive. A sexual party favor passed around by those loyal to the previous Master of the City. I didn’t have to answer her. She could read the direction of my thoughts. 

_“It seems I cannot escape it, even as Master of the City.”_

Her despair dragged me to my knees, scraping them raw on the pavement. I could hear her thoughts, as if they were my own, felt that she believed them. 

_Deluded little girl. Once a whore, always a whore. It’s all you’re good for, all you deserve._

_“No,”_ I forced out from between my teeth, batting the thought away with the viciousness it deserved. _“That’s bullshit.”_

_“I must keep Raina in the fold somehow, and pain is the only currency she accepts. She is éminence grise, the power behind the throne. Every wereanimal group must cooperate, or the system I’ve devised does not work.”_

_“Do they all do this?”_ I demanded. 

Was Rafael tormenting Jeanette as well? I couldn’t picture it, but I’d badly misjudged people before. 

More exhaustion edged with another wave of melancholy. 

_“No. Rafael merely asks that I find positions for displaced rats and to otherwise be left alone. He is easy enough to placate. Joseph is happily married and would refuse my bed even if I offered it. His lions have no interest in politicking. There are only a handful of born shifters in the city. The Oba of the werehyenas and I have... an understanding. A stalemate, if you will. The wolves and the leopards are the only dissenters. The wolves simply happen to be the third-largest group. Narcissa’s hyenas place second, and Rafael’s rats place first.”_

_“It ends now,”_ I thought, mental voice a harsh whisper. _“I won’t let them touch you again. I’ll kill them if they try.”_

She smiled gently, cloying pity in her midnight eyes. It was the indulgent smile that a mother gave to an adorable child. She knew it would happen again, and again, and again. There was no way to stop it, as far as she was concerned. God, how could someone be resigned to repeated rape?

_“There are no leopards strong enough to lead in Gabriel’s stead, and the only wolf suited for the position of Ulfric will not claim it.”_

Fuck that. There had to be a way. 

It was only then that I noticed a noise in the background. A soft moan echoed off the walls. An eye flick to the side revealed a pair of women in the bathroom with Jeanette, twined together on the opposite side of the Olympic-sized tub. One I recognized from the hunt. Tall, slender, with smooth, dark skin. Yasmeen. Her ebony hair had been let loose to tumble around her shoulders, shading her face like a curtain as she descended to capture the lips of an equally beautiful girl. 

It was a startling contrast. She was pale, but for the rosy flush that suffused her face and chest, with pink petal lips that molded easily to Yasmeen’s full mouth. Her hair was white blonde, bedraggled, and held away from her face by one of Yasmeen’s hands. The other was nowhere to be seen, though I could guess where it was currently nestled. The girl was keening into Yasmeen’s mouth, spine bowed, breath coming fast, ecstasy written all over her face. I couldn’t tear my eyes away when she shuddered, bucked, and let out one final, appreciative sound before collapsing into her partner, limbs supple and expression glazed. 

_“May I interject with a hearty' ‘what the fuck’, Jeanette? Why are they...?”_

Jeanette shifted her position in the corner of the tub. A wave of heat gathered in her body, sponging away the aches. Even as I watched, a few of the lacerations healed. 

_“I am of Belle’s line, Anita. She did not get a reputation for depravity without cause. I can draw from arousal when blood is scarce or simply not enough.”_

I got a sense that wasn’t the whole story but didn’t press. Berating her until she told the truth seemed like just compounding her abuse. There had to be some way to make this right. 

_“If I asked you to kiss it better, would you?”_

Cool liquid trailed down her cheeks, and I felt the echo of her tears on my face. If I’d been in the room, I’d have clambered into the tub, gathered her up, and held her until they stopped. I didn’t care who she was or what she’d done. No one deserved this. 

_“I don’t think it would stop there, Jeanette."_ I hesitated, trying to pick my words carefully. _“If... and it’s a big if... we went there… it shouldn’t be like this. I wouldn’t want it tainted by something this evil. You deserve better. I’m going to bump that date up. I’ll be by soon with food and... we’ll talk.”_

About how to fix this, among all the other concerns that needed to be addressed. 

“Thank you,” she whispered out loud this time. 

And then she rebuilt her walls, brick by agonizing brick, until her pain sheltered behind it, leaving me literally and figuratively standing in the cold, wondering how the fuck the night had gotten worse.


	15. Chapter 15

Though the doctors spent hours trying to repair the damage, Jessica Arnet lost part of her arm. The news was already circulating the police standing vigil in the waiting room when I slipped inside to return Zerbrowski’s coat. From the forearm down, necrosis had taken hold faster and more viciously than it had any right to. They’d been forced to take the arm before the rot could spread to her heart or brain. Even now, they were running a battery of tests and running IV antibiotics non-stop, in case any of the buggers had gotten through to infect more soft tissue. Some of the cops saw it as good news. She was alive, right? Better than the alternative. 

They were idiots. Well-meaning idiots, but idiots all the same. They’d smile at her and try to cram a noxious mouthful of gratitude down her throat until she choked. “Be thankful you’re alive!” they’d say. “At least you didn’t end up like poor James.” 

None of them knew what it was like to be the one in the bed. They couldn’t, until they were the one who escaped alive, but not whole. I’d been on the other side of the equation. For months, I’d been sure the burns that disfigured my left side would take me out of action. I knew the fear that scooped out your insides and left you hideously empty. I knew what it was like to see your life stripped down to its bedrock and wonder, “What am I good for now?” 

The insidious thing was, those voices got to you. They prompted you to smile through the worst parts of your life because hey, you weren’t dead. Somebody always had it worse. I’d bought into it once upon a time, too. People did it to distance themselves from your pain. Rank it, put it in a box, try to make it less real. It was bullshit, and I could already see people I liked ready to employ it. 

I asked Zerbrowski to keep people out of her room until her family arrived. Sometimes family made things worse, too, but at least the reprieve would give her some time. When the dust settled after this newest catastrophe I’d swing by and offer her Rafael’s name. Hell, maybe I’d track down this Joseph character, or the Oba of the werehyenas and take their measure. I was going to offer Arnet a chance to get that arm back, and I wanted to give her options. The wolves and the leopards weren’t safe groups to enter, that much was apparent. 

I smiled grimly at the horizon as I strode out into the night, though nothing about the situation struck me as funny. Only a few months into my role as human servant and I was enlisting people into the preternatural side of things. I should probably just leave Arnet well enough alone. She was a big girl. She could walk that gauntlet alone. 

_But she shouldn’t have to,_ that small, insistent voice whispered. I thought I’d curbed my young, hopeful idealism. I guess I’d only buried it six feet down, and now it had clawed its way to the surface. _Give her options, at least._

The little voice was right about one thing. I’d be giving her resources, not putting a gun to her head. Her doctors might suggest it as a form of treatment. Arnet would likely refuse a transfusion of therian blood hoping to hold on to the tatters of her career. If she was going to consider it, she needed another option in that regard as well. 

I sat straight-backed on a plastic bench outside Mercy Hospital, waiting for my ride to arrive. I was sorely regretting my decision to ride with Zerbrowski instead of following behind his Charger in my Jeep. Joshua Franks, an eighteen-year-old that I’d helped induct into the wererats, was Jeanette’s usual driver. This time of year, though, he was home for the holidays. That left one of Jeanette’s werewolf employees in charge of ferrying me around tonight.

Stephen was a stripper and one of the star attractions at _Iniquity_ , Jeanette’s preternatural strip club. With what I’d witnessed in mind, some of her business decisions made sense to me now. Drawing upon sexual energy had to be a breeze at a strip club. I’d grapple with the legal and moral quandaries of that later. For now, I just wanted answers. 

Stephen had stopped at a gas station fifteen minutes from Mercy Hospital, according to his text. It gave me just enough time to make an important phone call of my own. 

My fingers shook when I dialed the number. It wasn’t the one I was accustomed to using, and I fumbled a few times before I finally lifted the phone to my ear. It rang several times, and I was wondering if I was about to get an answering machine. I hadn’t called a landline or gotten an actual answering machine in years. Finally, a man’s voice answered. 

“You’ve reached Veronica Sims’ office. This is Simon, may I ask who’s calling?” 

I struggled to form words for a second. I hadn’t heard Simon’s voice in months. Ronnie’s wereskunk secretary also doubled as muscle when the occasion called for it. He and I weren’t bosom pals, but we’d always been friendly. I hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to be cut out of Ronnie’s life. I hadn’t just lost her. I’d lost everyone attached to her into the bargain.

“Hi Simon,” I said in a quiet, choked whisper. “It’s Anita. Do you think I could talk to Ronnie?” 

There was a tense silence on the other end of the phone. I could almost picture the gears grinding into motion. Simon liked me, or at least had at one point. I wasn’t sure what he’d said or heard about me in the months following the fallout. Even if he still liked me, I wasn’t the one who signed his paychecks. 

I played the only card I had left in my hand. Thankfully, it was a good one. 

“I’m at Mercy Hospital,” I said, just as quietly. “I’m hurt. I just want to talk.”

I was fudging the details a bit, but it was true. I’d been walloped by one thing after another since waking up this morning. The bruised ribs would stop aching eventually, and I’d regrow the hair Eden tore from my scalp. I wasn’t sure I could repair what killing her had done to my psyche. Some things you can’t unlearn. Sometimes, those insights made you feel downright small. 

Simon blew out a breath. “Let me put you on hold and talk with her. Don’t blame me if she hangs up.” 

“I won’t,” I said, and, hey, it wasn’t a lie. Simon couldn’t force Ronnie to be reasonable.

The line clicked, and suddenly Judy Garland’s voice was crooning _Somewhere Over the Rainbow_. _The Wizard of Oz_ was Ronnie’s favorite book and movie musical. It was something only a handful of people knew about her. 

Judy was halfway through telling me about melting lemon drops when the music cut out and Ronnie’s voice rattled over the speakers. 

“Going through my secretary, Anita? That’s not passive-aggressive at all.” 

“Tell me you wouldn’t have rejected the call if I’d used your personal number,” I countered. There was more bite to the words than I’d have liked.

She huffed out a breath, conceding the point. She waited the space of several more before she spoke. 

“Are you really hurt, or did you just say that to bypass Simon?” 

“I am at Mercy Hospital and I am hurt, but I wasn’t the worst off. RPIT escorted me to the Davis’ house to look over a suspected vampire attack.”

Ronnie’s office chair squeaked. She’d probably sat up straighter. 

“Oh my God. As in _Eden_ Davis? Evil bitch and almost monster-in-law?” 

“Yes. She was dead. Well... undead. She rose a vampire and attacked a detective. I had to kill her, Ronnie.” 

It all sounded so clinical, laid out like that. Logical and reasonable, and nothing I should be agonizing over hours later. And yet here I was, wallowing in it. The fresh tears burned behind my eyes, painfully warm in the frigid night air. It would hurt to cry, so I swallowed them down, breathed hard until I could get a handle on myself. 

“God, Anita. I’m so sorry.” 

Ronnie’s sincere apology was like a painful little jab to the solar plexus. I couldn’t breathe. Scorn or blithe dismissal would have hurt less. But she knew me the way only friends do. She might know me better than I knew myself. No one had been more surprised by the grief than me. Yet Ronnie knew. 

I’d all but lost my best friend over something I had no part in, something that had taken place before either of us were even born. She was coming after Manny. I couldn’t throw him under the bus to preserve the friendship, the way she would have liked. So all we’d had for months was brief, strained conversations, and emails to compare notes on cases. 

A lone, traitorous tear ran in a scalding rivulet down my cheek before I could bat it away. I wasn’t going to pieces over the phone. This wasn’t my therapy session. I was calling to ask a favor. 

“The detective who was attacked lost her hand and part of her forearm. She’s one of the new psychic hires attached to RPIT. I can’t tell you what flavor of psychic she is, because she’s only been with the Taskforce a few months. I’m going to offer her a list of therianthropes she could turn to for help.”

“Because no matter what happens, her career is over,” Ronnie said. I didn’t think the disgust in her voice was aimed at me this time around. “At least as a therian she could regrow the limb.” 

“If she decides to turn furry, she’ll have trouble finding a job where she can use her skill set. I just happen to know a kick-ass private eye who is currently lacking someone to fill the role of psychic in her buddy-cop drama.” 

“The kick-ass private eye doesn’t want to recast the psychic,” Ronnie said quietly. “She wants the psychic to realize she’s protecting the wrong people.” 

Another scalding tear fell, and then another. I tried to hide a sniffle. It was cold out and I had no coat. She couldn’t know for certain I was crying. 

“Would you take her on, if she decides to go that route?” 

“Of course I will. I can always use another set of hands around here.” Ronnie seemed to realize what she’d said a second later. “Oh, Jesus! That’s just...I’m sorry!” 

The sound that escaped me was almost a cackle. I couldn’t help it. It was just so damn _sad_ and Ronnie sounded so _horrified_ and everything around me was so goddamn _wrong_ that I had to laugh. If I didn’t, I’d scream. 

“Thank you, Ronnie. You’re good people.” 

Ronnie sighed. “You too, Anita. Let me know how things go, okay?” 

I assured her I would and hung up. Stephen pulled up minutes later in Jeanette’s burgundy 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III Coupe. The sight was a balm on my frayed nerves. I had a certain appreciation for luxury, sports, and muscle cars. It brought back afternoons with dad, rhapsodizing over all the various models we’d never be able to afford. 

And the memories gave me an idea of what I could do for the impromptu date. Jeanette could afford just about anything she wanted now, but I could give her a few experiences she’d never had. 

Stephen gave me an oblique look when I gave him directions, and a skeptical stare the entire time we loaded up our fare. 

“Are you sure this is enough food, Anita?” he asked, oozing sarcasm. 

“God, I hope so,” was all I could think to reply. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As far as I can remember in canon Jessica doesn't have psychic powers. Still, this is a fix-it fic and I'm gonna go that route. :)


	16. Chapter 16

“Where is everyone?” I asked, peering around at the miles of empty asphalt that stretched around the Circus of the Damned. 

Ordinarily, the Circus attendees overflowed the parking lot and began parallel parking on the street. A feat, because the converted warehouse that housed the Circus and its parking lot ran the length of the block.

The sign atop the warehouse depicted a pair of fanged clowns danced a jig atop the words “Circus of the Damned.” Ordinarily, the strobing neon would flick from one clown to the other every few seconds. At the moment, the sign was powered down, so it was just a hunk of metal and glass. 

The warehouse proper was painted with slanting red and yellow stripes that were meant to imitate a big top. The posters plastered across the front,= advertised everything from death-defying trapeze and tightrope acts to zombie raisings. An actual three-ring circus would be set up inside, and a dozen small tents would be arranged throughout so that tourists could mill around, paying to meet and take photos with some of the more well-known personalities. Most of the main performers had appeared in at least one of Hammer Horror’s vampsploitation films over the years. 

Even when buoyed by the lights and the crowds, the Circus looked woebegone. Empty and largely unlit? It looked like it had an imminent date with a wrecking ball. Lighting, or lack thereof, took the place from kitschy to creepy in an instant. 

“Closed for maintenance. It happens occasionally. This one is overdue. They’re doing routine safety checks on the rides, taking the chance to deep-clean the place and train a few new acts. When the Circus reopens, the Master is planning on having an exotic animal show. A flipping enormous snake arrived yesterday. It took three of us to unload the damn thing. I didn’t know snakes got that big.” 

“Green Anacondas can weigh up to a thousand pounds, according to some sources, but not every account has been substantiated.”

“They said it was a boa,” Stephen said. “Though...honestly, I’ve been to the Saint Louis Zoo. It didn’t really look like either.” 

Strange. Maybe I’d take a look before I left the Circus. I couldn’t afford to spend more than an hour or two liaising with Jeanette. 

Stephen threw the Coupe into park in a space near the front entrance, nearly dinging a white custodial van as he exited. He shrugged and began loading bags onto his well-muscled forearms until more plastic was visible than flesh. By the time he was through, it left me with only a handful of bags to carry inside. I couldn’t even put my finger on why I wanted to bitch about that. He was stronger and faster than I was. Did I really want to make things less efficient to satisfy the irrational urge? 

Yeah. I could admit that I did. So I scratched the feminist itch by rushing ahead to open the door for Stephen, holding it until he’d shuffled through. Ah, equilibrium restored. 

The scent of cotton candy and stale popcorn saturated the air. The Circus hosted a genuine carnival midway. Rides, games, and concessions for the kiddies, and more adult entertainment further inside. A three-ring circus with tumblers, clowns, and trapeze artists. A hall of human (and not so human) oddities. A graveyard with genuine corpses buried six feet down. 

Allegedly, every body in the loamy soil had willed their remains to the Master of the City for just this purpose, but I still thought the practice was tacky. Some of Grandma Flores’ lessons stuck with me, no matter how many years passed. I raised dead to provide catharsis or answers. Raising the dead to amuse someone else just stole their humanity and commodified their corpse. It was about the only subject we saw eye-to-eye on.

A few employees milled around the midway, though most were clustered around the rides or scrubbing down stalls. Most of the tents had been disassembled, and the ones that weren’t had their flaps open to allow easy access. If I craned my neck, I could make out a loose, heavy coil of a snake winding ponderously through the dirt. 

Stephen hadn’t been exaggerating. If the one coil was anything to go by, the so-called “boa” was bigger than any snake I’d ever seen or heard of. It’d be impossible to make any distinctions until I could take a closer look, but the beige and dark brown coloring of the quarter-sized scales more closely resembled a horned viper than a boa. I’d never heard of a venomous snake capable of reaching that size or weight. A constrictor. It had to be. Just...one I hadn’t encountered before. 

A woman was leaning in to gawk at the snake, and I couldn’t blame her. She was shorter than I was, though she compensated for a few of those inches with voluminous curls. They fell in perfectly tousled waves around a tanned, oval face. I could tell at a glance she was pretty, though I didn’t have time to stare. Stephen was striding purposefully toward the back, and I followed at a brisk jog to keep up. Though he was around my height, he was faster and in no mood to lug food around all day. 

Most of the vampires slept beneath the Circus of the Damned in a series of natural and man-made caves. But if you were desperate for a place to crash, there was a guest room of sorts topside. It was tucked away into the far corner of the warehouse, away from any prying eyes. From the outside, it looked like just another maintenance closet, but when you pulled the door open and stepped inside, you found a small but comfortable living space. A full-sized bed with a heavy red duvet, and four fluffy pillows. Black drapes for atmosphere, though there wasn’t a window in sight. A soft ivory area rug, and a single drop light hanging from the bare rafters. 

Jeanette was lounging indolently on the bed, one hand thrust behind a tousled, ebony mass of hair. It was curlier than I remembered. Did she straighten it within an inch of its life every evening? Usually only the ends curled. 

She propped herself up on her elbows when we entered the room, watching with wary interest as Stephen laid my purchases on the desk and backed hastily out of the room.

Her skin was pale ivory perfection once more. The long, slender column of her neck was pink in places but didn’t seem inflamed. The long-sleeved teal blouse she wore was buttoned to her collarbone, so I couldn’t tell if the impressions of teeth were still etched into her breast or if that, too, had disappeared.

I wasn’t sure how to begin. The question I wanted to ask, “Are you alright?” had an obvious answer. No. She wasn’t alright. Wouldn’t be alright. Nothing I said or did could change what the monsters had done to her.

The word monster had a broad, easily applied meaning to me at one time. Now, it wasn’t as clear cut. Was Jeanette a monster? Maybe. I didn’t know. Was a shark a monster because it killed to eat? Or was the often sexually coercive and murderous dolphin the bigger monster, because it didn’t have the same hunger, but killed anyway?

Jeanette sat up and swung her long, slender legs over the side of the bed, coming to her feet in one smooth move. The charcoal gray slacks hugged the slender curve of her hips. It was one of the few times I’d ever seen her wear pants, and I found it oddly… compelling. Sure, the usual skirts and dresses bared smooth and shapely legs, but the pants had possibilities.

Small, puckered lines appeared between her brows as she scanned the bags I’d brought.

“What’s all this?”

“I said I’d bring food. I tried to think about what you might like while I waited for Stephen to arrive and I had a thought.”

“And?”

“And the stupidest thing happened when he pulled up in the Coupe. It made me think of summer, and days with my dad. When I was younger, we used to look at magazines or attend car shows and I’d wonder what it’d be like to afford the things I wanted. I know it was a lot worse for you as a French peasant.”

Her brow was still furrowed. She didn’t see where I was going with this.

I reached over and pulled a box from the top of the nearest bag, lifting the lid so she could peer inside.

“Putting food on the table was a challenge most of your life. There are some foods from your own culture you’ve never tasted. You were too poor in life, and after you died, you couldn’t taste anything but blood. I’m not sure if it’s the most authentic experience money can buy, and I’m not exactly a foodie. I wasn’t sure what you’d want to start with first. These are… um…”

I squinted at the label. “ _Chou a la crème_. You said that was a cream puff, right?”

Jeanette didn’t answer. She’d gone very still, her face utterly impassive. It was like looking like a very somber statue. That probably wasn’t a good sign. I was probably making things worse.

It was fucking stupid. No amount of chocolate, butter, or frosting erased what she’d just gone through. What had I been thinking?

My words came out too quickly, tripping over each other as I tried to salvage the situation.

“I… um… I’m not a drinker. You know that. But I stopped at a store on the way over and picked out a sparkling grape juice. I’m not sure if it will clash.”

Jeanette’s eyes filled with tears. They fell silently, one crystalline drop at a time, leaving a slightly pink sheen on her pale skin.

“Sorry,” I blurted. “God, I’m sorry. This was stupid. I-”

One moment she was standing on the opposite side of the room, calves braced against the full-sized mattress. The next she was inches away. Less. Her cool breath fanned over my face an instant before our lips met, her full mouth pressing urgently to mine.

The kiss was brief and still left me breathless.

“Je t’aime.”

Oh fuck. 

“Jeanette-”

She pressed a cool finger to my lips before I could say more. 

“I did not mean to frighten you, ma petite. I meant to say… this is the most thoughtful thing anyone has done for me in a very long time. Merci.”

“So what? You want me to pretend that didn’t just happen?”

One side of her mouth quirked up in a wry smile. “Unless you have a declaration you’d like to put forward?” 

Shit. This was the sort of thing I’d been avoiding for months. I’d been uncomfortably aware of her interest from the start. Honestly? It was easier to when I thought it was only lust. That I could wrap my head around. Not this. Not the warmth, the hope, the pure fucking earnestness of the feeling. I only caught a short, concentrated burst. She didn’t let the shields slip for long. But I felt it. I knew. 

I couldn’t even begin to sort through the murky morass of my own feelings. I didn’t hate her. Not anymore. I could even admit to being a little fond of her. I appreciated her insight occasionally, valued her opinion. I didn’t trust her, though, and that crucial. I’d thought about letting her die...and then I couldn’t let her go gentle into that good night. 

Why? Why couldn’t I just let her go? 

I didn’t love her. I didn’t. 

“Ma petite?” 

“I’m dating Richard.” 

I regretted the words the instant they slipped out. I wasn’t even sure why I’d said them. They sort of fell into the silence. A silence that built and built until I was sure the tension would snap me in two.

Her wry smile hadn’t slipped. She didn’t shout. She didn’t cry. 

“I see,” was all she said. She took a step away from me and plucked one of the puff pastries from the open box. “I think you’re right. We’ll try the cream puffs first.” 

“That’s it?” 

She leaned her hip against the desk and turned her head. The fixed smile didn’t waver, but her eyes were a touch cooler when she looked at me. 

“What else is there to say?” she asked, tone neutral. Downright pleasant, under the circumstances. If I’d been in her shoes, I’d probably have shouted. 

“I...” 

“I won’t beg for a place in your bed, Anita,” she said, a bite of anger now clear in her tone. “I barter away the remains of my dignity to keep my territories safe. I won’t turn my passions into a game of politics as well. If you want to court Monsieur Zeeman, you are welcome to him. But do not think I will stand idly by, pining for you as you do it.” 

Oh God. Why the fuck couldn’t I have just left it alone? 

But Jeanette wasn’t through. 

“I can and have shared my lovers. Richard Zeeman will not. There will be no happy ménage à trois between us. If you are intent on seeing him, know I will pursue others.” She gave me very solid eye contact at that. “And you _will not_ punish me for it. Are we clear?” 

I had a very brief, very fleeting urge to knock her into the wall. What I’d do when I got her there, I wasn’t sure. 

“Punish you? How old do you think I am? _Five_?” 

“I think you are reactionary, capricious, and cruel when it suits you, ma petite. Just know I won’t tolerate a double standard.” 

It was almost a relief when the screaming started in the Circus proper. It at least gave me an excuse to turn my back on her and run. 

At least confronting this monster would hurt less.


	17. Chapter 17

The gawking woman wasn’t waiting by the tent flaps when I reached the killing floor. The tent wasn’t even where I’d seen it last. The candy-striped fabric rested a half-mile off, draped across the crushed remnants of a concession stand. It looked like a giant had dropped a kerchief down to hide the mess. A figure lay splayed on top of the pile, but it was too far away to make out whether the shape was male or female. Hell, too far away to tell if they were still living. 

Jeanette came to a stop behind me, one pale hand fluttering toward her side, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there. If we survived this, I was getting her a Glock 43. Between Claudia and me, she’d learn how to use it. She needed something on her person on the off chance something blew through her fortifications, her guards, and me. 

Something like a forty-foot long constrictor. 

It was reared to strike the figures circling it, huge, horned head brushing the bare rafters, and still, it had enough mass to leave coils on the ground. Muscles flexed beneath the beige scales. It had semi-rectangular blotches of darker brown markings flecked with copper that caught the overhead light and reflected it back at us, dazzling starbursts that I could see even when I closed my eyes. Its body was three feet across, capable of crushing most of me handily without exerting an ounce of pressure.

This thing was definitely not a common boa constrictor. It wasn’t an anaconda either. I’d never heard of a snake this large. Not in this epoch, at least. Titanoboa could reach forty feet or more, but they were extinct. Then again...Homo Erectus vampires weren’t supposed to exist in the modern world either. Still, that didn’t seem right. Titanoboa thrived in the tropics. This thing looked like a sand snake. 

“ _Putain de merde_!” Jeanette hissed. 

“Amen,” I said with a breathless chuckle. 

The laughter died away when the snake’s coils shifted, revealing a roughly human-sized bulge in its middle. Fuck. It had already eaten someone. 

The enormous, horned snake struck with dizzying speed, narrowly missing the vampire it was aiming for. Meng Die danced nimbly out of the way mere seconds before the snake’s snout struck the ground, kicking up a fine layer of earth. I coughed, choking on a sudden influx of dust and small, pulverized rock. The snake shuddered with rage, releasing a hiss that reminded me of an eighteen-wheeler releasing its breaks but magnified. It echoed around the warehouse, raising the hair on the back of my neck. 

I was willing to bet I wasn’t the only one who’s sphincter had tightened, just a little. 

Meng Die moved just a little closer to Jeanette and I, putting her body between her master and the oncoming snake. Jeanette had informed me Meng Die wanted to stage a coup and become vampire in chief for Saint Louis and the surrounding area. Still, I couldn’t imagine it was good optics to allow your predecessor to be eaten by a giant serpent without putting in the pretense of trying to stop it.

Meng Die would have drawn almost every eye in the room if not for the snake. Black, sequined hot pants clung to her small but firm backside and barely reached down to caress the tops of her thighs. Pale flesh peeked out from fishnet tights in tantalizing little squares and drew the eye down to her tiny bare feet. She’d abandoned the red double-breasted ringman’s coat, and the stiletto boots she’d been wearing sometime before we arrived. It left her in a shimmering gold bustier and a headband with a miniature top hat. She looked like a tiny, delicate doll made up as a ringmaster. 

And then she promptly shattered the image by flicking the bullwhip she clutched in one hand at the snake’s eye. At this close range, and with an object that could flay skin and break bones, the snake didn’t stand a chance of rearing back in time, if it even knew what it was dealing with. 

The whip found its mark and blood washed across the sclera in a sudden, startling burst of crimson. 

Herpetology hadn’t been my area of study, but I knew ordinary snakes couldn’t bellow. Certainly not loud enough to shake the foundations of the Circus of the Damned. So this thing had to not only be old, but preternatural as well. Wyrm and leviathan were rumored to make that sort of noise, though scientists still hotly debated whether the ultra-low-frequency, high amplitude underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997, simply known as “the Bloop” was the result of ice calving or a leviathan roaming in the deep. 

But this wasn’t the ocean. So what the fuck was it? 

The snake writhed, its tail lashing into the small Ferris Wheel nearest it. The motion wrenched the colorful wheel off its foundations and shunted it through the back wall of the Circus and into the employee parking lot. It trembled upright for a half-second before tipping to the pavement. A car alarm screamed. I wasn’t sure whose. 

Stephen stumbled toward us, one half of his handsome face a mask of blood. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and that made my skin prickle with worry. His hair was matted with the stuff, and when he turned his head, there was an oddly misshapen lump near the back. Skull fracture? God, I hoped not.

“Report,” Jeanette ordered. 

I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to Stephen or Meng Die. I wasn’t even sure if Stephen was in any shape to speak, let alone give a detailed analysis on how hosed we were.

“It just started growing,” Stephen panted. “We’re not sure what triggered it. It caught Rashida and...” 

Stephen staggered another step and the eye I could see filled with tears. They trembled on his lashes, and he couldn’t seem to force the words out. 

“And it crushed her like an aluminum can,” Meng Die finished with a grimace. “Her ribs snapped like brittle matchsticks. If it’s any consolation, wolf, she was probably dead before it swallowed her.”

I wasn’t sure who looked more appalled, Stephen or Jeanette. 

“Never become a therapist, Meng Die,” I muttered, drawing the Browning from its inner pants holster. “You’re about as comforting as a barbed-wire teddy bear.”

I only had fourteen shots in the Browning. That seemed woefully inadequate against a monster of this size.

Meng Die rolled one slim shoulder in a shrug. “Would you rather I lie? Yasmeen, Marguerite, and Raina are attempting to dispatch it from the opposite side with limited success. The reinforcements were due to arrive via the back entrance, but...” 

Meng Die nodded at the wreckage of the back lot. I didn’t see much getting through the twisted metal roadblock, even determined wererats. So we weren’t getting back up right away. Great.

Another pressing detail registered. Raina? The bitch who’d assaulted Jeanette was still here? Shame she wasn’t the bulge in the snake’s stomach. Would it be bad form to let the monster eat a slightly smaller monster? 

Yes, it was.

Goddamnit. 

“What have you tried?” Jeanette asked though the words came out half a yelp as the snake rounded on us again. 

I acted on instinct, holstering the gun hastily, lunging for Jeanette, seizing the cloth of her blouse as I drove forward in a football-style tackle. She was light. Lighter even than my kid brother, Josh, and easy to take off her feet. The momentum drove us forward five or six feet before I lost my balance and we both went sprawling, coming to a painful stop against one of the last standing tent poles in the area. It had been pummeled until it resembled an oversize L-wrench. Jeanette’s back took most of the blow, and I felt it like a distant echo as the impact shook the concentration needed to maintain her shields. 

I ended up on top, rising into a half-crouch so I could drag her limp body further away. The slit pupil of its remaining eye settled on me, tracking the movement with unsettling intensity. I glimpsed four rows of large, recurved teeth in its open mouth before its head snapped away from us, toward whatever distraction Yasmeen and company had devised. 

Each tooth had been around the length of my palm. Gulp. 

I had to shout to make myself heard over a fresh reptilian bellow. 

“I’m not an expert in herpetology, but if it acts like most constrictors, it’s going to bite first, then throw coil over the victim and constrict. Not that it needs to do either to kill us. I’m pretty sure one bite or squeeze will do.” I frowned. “God, that’s cheery. Strike therapist off my list of additional career paths as well.” 

Jeanette’s chuckle could have been mistaken for a gasp. “What do you recommend?” 

“My kit should be in the office. Bring it. There will be my usual supplies, a legal shotgun, and a very illegal sawed-off shotgun and mini uzi tucked into a hidden bottom. I’m hoping if we can bind it somehow, we can take the head off with concentrated bursts from the mini uzi. It can saw regular folks in half.” 

Jeanette gave me a narrow-eyed look. “You’re trying to get me out of the line of fire.” 

I gave her a hard stare in return. “I’m armed and you aren’t. Get the damn kit and rectify the situation. Shotguns aren’t exactly rocket science, and it’s better than nothing. Now go!” 

Jeanette gave me one last searching glance before disentangling herself from me, staggering to her feet, and sprinting away to do as I’d asked. I waited for a tortured half-second, watching her retreat like a long-legged wraith into the gloom of the Circus. I almost expected the rounded snake head to snatch her mid-stride and send her flailing into its gut. 

Only after she’d ducked out of sight could I concentrate on the fight. If I were honest with myself, I was pretty sure my Browning would have about as much effect on the snake’s scaly hide as a marshmallow gun. My best bet was also damn dangerous. Wait for it to strike and take out the other eye or, failing that, shoot through the soft palate into the brain. And in that case, which came first, the brain slurry or the skewered necromancer? 

I moved as quickly as I dared, keeping the Browning in a two-handed grip as I inched around the snake. The snake’s coils rose above me, a mountain of scales and seething muscle. I had to roll to avoid being laid out by a rapidly shifting coil. The snake wasn’t focused on me. There was a shriek and, as I watched, Stephen’s half-man form was batted across the room, impacting against the tent pole Jeanette and I had abandoned at what had to be highway speeds. The pole toppled and, barely audible over the sounds of protesting metal, was Stephen’s impression of snap, crackle, and pop.

“Stephen!” 

I wasn’t the only one who shouted his name. Another voice echoed mine. A rich, throaty call that couldn’t seem to lose a note of sensuality, despite the gravity of the situation. If it were any deeper, I’d have called it a contralto. It wasn’t edged with worry, precisely. Outrage. The tone a child takes with the kid who’s taken their toy. That’s mine, and you don’t get to touch it. 

The source of the voice was a truly stunning woman. Tall, and the epitome of athletic beauty. This woman should have been plastered on a Sports Illustrated cover. Muscles moved gracefully under lightly bronzed skin as she moved. Either she was naturally tan, or she sunbathed naked because there were no tan lines I could see. And I could see a great deal. She wasn’t wearing anything but a fierce, wolfish smile. 

Her soft auburn hair gleamed as she moved, yanking a strip of the snake’s flank free of the whole, like a kid picking apart a piece of string cheese. It came free with a wet sound. Blood slopped over the quarter-sized scales and onto the ground. No wonder the thing had been bellowing. The woman had scattered growing piles of snake flesh all around. She had gore splashed up to her elbows, and the shudder of ecstasy that ran through her did interesting things to her breasts. I swore the dusky pink nipples grew harder as she raised one hand to her mouth and sampled the viscera. 

This had to be Raina. No one else in the room was psychotic enough.

The tentative plan solidified in my head as I spied those strips of flesh. My original idea had been to find a rope or maybe cable to tie down the snake. Where we’d find it, I wasn’t sure, but it had beat the hell out of sitting still while the thing ate us. Now, an awful idea took root and became an unshakable certainty in my head. 

I could do it. I’d done enough research after the Dominga Salvador debacle to know the principle. The question was, did I have the stomach to use it? 

Out of the corner of my eye, I spied the remainder of our team. The woman from before was scaling the ladder to one of the trapeze platforms. Yasmeen appeared to have just rolled out of bed because she wore a black silk kimono and little else. She was kneeling by Marguerite’s feet.

Marguerite was dressed in a black-and-white striped lycra bodysuit. Her corn-silk hair had been pulled into a severe bun, and in one hand she clutched a length of jagged metal. Her palm was oozing blood, and she didn’t seem to mind as it wound like a scarlet ribbon down her forearm. She stepped into the offered cradle of Yasmeen’s hands, springing into the air with practiced grace as her lover flung her upward with astonishing strength and speed. I only belatedly recognized her from the posters outside, one of the star trapeze artists. 

The snake’s head snapped forward as Marguerite’s body descended. One enormous recurved tooth spitted Marguerite’s off hand, but not before the jagged metal spike found its mark, sinking like a serrated toothpick into the custard-like surface of the snake’s remaining eye.

Mission accomplished, Marguerite released her hold and went plummeting to earth before the snake could toss her like a limp rag doll across the room. She landed with a similarly gruesome chorus of snaps as Stephen, but I thought maybe she’d live if the snake didn’t throw its weight onto her. 

I holstered my gun, knelt by the nearest pile, and began lining up the strips end to end. Beneath the gore, the pebbled snakeskin was cooling. It was no longer part of the whole. Dead. Perfect for my purpose. 

Raina came to stand above me, amber eyes watching me with a keen, animalistic hunger. There was a purring edge to her voice when she spoke. 

“What are you doing, Executioner?” 

“Necromancy. Help me line these up.” 

Raina paused for only a fraction of a second before doing as I asked, lining up the strips of flesh and any pulpy bits she’d gouged out of the snake.

Our hands touched for the briefest of moments during the process, and something deeply unpleasant shivered over my skin. Her aura writhed and pulsed like a maggot-ridden corpse. It was so revolting that I pulled my hands back on reflex and took a step back, putting some distance between us. Raina didn’t even seem offended by it. She watched me scuttle back with a vulpine smile. The tip of her tongue skimmed her bottom lip like she was licking away the last remnants of frosting on a cupcake. 

“You taste of sweet decay.” 

“Yeah, you smell like a basket of roses too,” I shot back. “Now move.” 

Raina didn’t argue. She took a step away and watched through luminous eyes as I laid a hand on the nearest strip of flesh. I had everything I needed for this bit of morally questionable magic. Blood, flesh, and will. 

After Dominga Salvador had met her untimely end, her books had been willed to public institutions. All her notes, recordings, and off-the-record black magic fuckery had been hidden in the walls of her home. Manny had been willing to trespass onto the empty property only once, and only to ensure the really evil shit didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Someone had taken the thing I wanted to understand most. I’d wanted to know how she made the modified Govi that halted rot and returned the soul to a zombie body. 

This ritual had been left behind, though. Dominga’s improvements on Mary Shelley’s chimera research. How to Frankenstein your own zombie terminator in three easy steps. Or in this case? How to make snakeskin rope. 

I called to the tightly coiled power inside of me and urged it to the surface, into the inert flesh under my hands. 

The skin responded, rippling like an eel, slick and unnerving to hold. At my urging, the tissues fused, running like smooth wax where they’d joined. Those would be the weak points. It would need to be shored up with more muscle or fat deposits if I wanted to make a true chimera. But for this purpose? I was sure it could hold for long enough to get the job done. 

Raina made a soft, almost pleased sound behind me. Far from being upset by what she’d seen, she seemed almost aroused by it. 

“Such power,” she breathed. 

I ignored her, focusing on the task at hand. 

“Bind the serpent!” I ordered. 

The meaty rope reared like a smaller, headless serpent and lunged for the snake from whence it came, latching onto a gouged portion of the neck as if it had teeth. Then it threw coil after coil around the much larger snake, bearing down with all the pressure it could muster, flattening the snake momentarily to the ground. 

Jeanette came bounding back toward us, my kit in hand. I just had to hold the thrashing snake until—

The gawking woman had reached the top of the trapeze platform and thrown off her coat, revealing she was wearing almost as much as Meng Die beneath. A miniskirt that rode high on a generous swell of hips and black lace bralette that could barely restrain her ample bosom. She got a running start and flung herself into the empty air above the snake’s now bound head, wielding a modified electric cattle prod in one hand. It shot off sparks, looking like the nightmarish combination of spear and lightning bolt as she descended. 

The impact of her boots alone shattered the snake’s orbital socket. The cattle prod sank deep, cracking through the skull as if it were just a brittle eggshell. The snake spasmed violently, threatening to buck her off, but the new woman held her ground, digging the prod in until the snake gave one final shudder and ceased moving altogether. 

The stillness that followed was weighty. I knew I wasn’t the only one staring at our eleventh-hour savior. She straightened to her full and unimpressive height and returned our stares, jaw set, eyes empty of anything but a cold sort of triumph. 

I knew that look. I’d seen it on another, more masculine face before. And just from the cool, arrogant bearing alone, I knew who she must be. And I now knew that the snake hadn’t been the deadliest predator in the room.

My voice came out level and much, much calmer than I felt. 

“Hello, Bellona.” 

Cruel amusement sparked in her dark eyes, and her lips curled into a slightly fiendish smile, watching as Jeanette moved to my side. 

“You know this woman, ma petite?” 

“Yes. This is War.” 


	18. Chapter 18

War consumed everything but the cream puffs. I was able to salvage one box from the pile before Bellona plowed through the rest. 

We were arrayed around Jeanette’s guest room, clustered in groups of two or three, silent but for the appreciative sounds Bellona made as she devoured the expensive pastries. Jeanette had wisely chosen to keep Bellona far from the entrance to her Kiss’ daytime resting place. The precise locations had shifted in the caves after Edward’s incursion, some of the tunnels even destroyed with controlled charges to discourage an opportunistic hunter. 

The backs of my thighs pressed against the desk’s edge, one side of my body leaning into Jeanette’s. I kept one hand hanging loosely at my side, ready to go for the Browning if Bellona made any sudden moves. Jeanette had managed to procure a set of throwing knives and strapped the slim blades and their leg sheath on while the rest of us became unwilling participants in Reptile Rumble. 

Jeanette’s hand rested lightly on the bare skin at the small of my back. Her power danced over my skin, easing the aches I’d accumulated over the course of the day. It filled the room like cool, soapy water, the bubbles popping along the bare skin where we touched. It wasn’t just for my benefit; I knew. Yasmeen had Marguerite’s head cradled in her lap, the rest of the young woman’s badly battered body supine on the bed. As a vampire blood-oathed to Jeanette, she could give power to the Master of the City and receive power in return. Jeanette was feeding as much as she could afford to Yasmeen, who would in turn share it with Marguerite. 

Dr. Lillian arrived on the scene fifteen minutes after the snake had been neutralized, accompanied by around thirty of Rafael’s wererats. Too late to do Rashida and a handful of other Circus employees any good, but just in time to save Stephen and Marguerite. Stephen would be able to heal his broken back eventually, but his dancing days were over for now. He’d been bundled into the back of an ambulance and spooned by Raina. The proximity of her beast would supposedly encourage healing.

Marguerite had broken every bone in her right arm and had compound fractures in both legs. Yasmeen hadn’t been able to vault the snake in time to save her servant from hitting the ground. They’d both been lucky. If she’d impacted skull first, they’d both be dead. Neither of them looked comforted by the thought, though. Marguerite was grimacing, even in her sleep. Yasmeen kept stroking her hair, murmuring to her in a language I wasn’t familiar with. Dr. Lillian had done what little she could for Marguerite but, ultimately, proximity to Yasmeen and Jeanette would be the best medicine. We’d have moved down to the daytime resting place for more comfortable accommodations and access to better supplies, but...

There was a fucking Horseman in our house eating our pastries and wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her coat as she did it.

“Are you through?” I demanded as Bellona licked the last of the cream off the ends of her fingers. 

Alright, yes, I was getting annoyed. Maybe I didn’t like Jeanette’s people, but I didn’t hate them either. I didn’t want her anywhere near my city, let alone its people. Where War went, chaos was sure to follow. Edward had said as much. If his theory was correct, we were in a hell of a lot of trouble. 

The only things keeping me from jumping right out of my skin were Jeanette’s touch and, ironically, Bellona’s presence in the room. If she’d meant to kill Jeanette, she could have managed it by now. She could have shot her during the battle and claimed it had been an accident. Hell, she could have just taken up a position on the catwalk, crippled one of Jeanette’s legs, and made her easy prey for the snake. Instead, she’d impaled its skull with a modified cattle prod. Why go to the trouble if Jeanette was her mark? 

Bellona slid her middle finger out of her mouth with an audible pop and smiled sweetly at me even as she flipped me the bird. If I counted the backup Rafael had pumped into the Circus, she was facing thirty-four supernaturally strong, battle-ready combatants unarmed. Fredo, one of the new guards, had removed around six semi-automatics before pronouncing her clean.

Despite that, Bellona didn’t seem overly concerned. Either she had the biggest, brassiest balls I’d ever seen, or she had a future in high stakes poker. 

When she spoke, I could detect a hint of an Italian accent. My mind immediately jumped to the rumors of personal protection rackets run by the Sicilian Mafia. Vampires were still reviled in most of Italy and, though they’d officially been legal citizens for a while now. If crucifixes weren’t enough to put your mind at ease, it was rumored the Mafia could protect your homes and business...for a fee. Supposedly, Cosa Nostra owned entire towns in the Italian countryside. Maybe that’s where War had gotten her start.

Which was why it confused the hell out of me when she spoke French. 

“Testy, aren’t you, petite mort?” 

I frowned at her for a moment, then glanced over at Jeanette to see if the handful of words had made sense to her. From the bewildered look on her face, I could guess the answer. 

“You just called me...an orgasm. Trust me, there’s been a dearth of those lately. I don’t have the time or inclination to get off with myself, let alone with anyone else.” 

Bellona laughed and it was a rich, almost purring sound. Between the outfit and that sound, she reminded me of a cat batting playfully at the hand that attempted to stroke it. She threw her head back and dark ringlets cascaded around her shoulders. Perfect, calculated beauty. Like Jeanette, she seemed very aware of her looks and just how to use them. 

“Oh, that’s precious! He hasn’t told you?” 

I’d officially graduated from annoyed to pissed off. I let my hand come to rest on the Browning’s grip, just in case. If she was toying with us, I needed to be ready. 

“Told me what?” I snapped. 

She pursed her full, glossed lips and considered me. “I’m not sure it’s my secret to tell, if he hasn’t informed you.”

“Oh bullshit. You seemed happy enough to bait me just a second ago. Tell me what the fuck you’re on about now, or we’re going to see how talkative you are sans a kneecap.”

Another laugh bubbled out of her. “Oh, I like you. You’re brave. Stupid, but brave.”

She let the pastry box topple to the floor, revealing what she’d been concealing with the croissants and her coat. In her left hand, she clutched a Seecamp LWS. It looked tiny, even in her small hands. Too small to be as deadly as it was. And she’d had it pointed at me this entire time.

Fuck. Where had she hidden it? Fredo’s pat-down had been pretty thorough. 

"How'd you get that past the guards? They should have smelled the powder or primer." 

Bellona tapped the side of her nose. "Ah, the power of military advancement. It's only been pronounced viable this year. A compound that induces temporary olfactory fatigue in vamps and wereanimals. Should do a lot of good when facing preternatural insurgents. I wiped down the Seecamp before ending that little skirmish back there. Don't worry, this blend only lasts around ten minutes."

Then she'd gone on to waft as much sugary-sweet scent into the room as possible to mask the scent. And we'd fallen for it. Goddamn it, why wasn't Edward warning me about these things?

'Where was it hidden?" 

"Flashbang holster. Men are so nervous when patting down a woman. One grope and he's out of a job, right?"

And she was right again. If I'd seen him cop a feel, I'd have tossed him out on his ass. Damn it. I was going to have to talk to Claudia about this.

Bellona smiled indulgently at me, leaning forward like she was a favorite aunt about to impart a lesson. 

“All that aside, I'll give you a pro tip. Spirit and creativity will get you far in our trade, but you’re going to have to curb the impulsive streak if you want to be a Horseman, Miss Blake. Baiting things bigger and badder than yourself because you’re scared is a good way to find your brains smeared across a wall. I’d hate for Death to lose another protegee. He seems to like you.”

“Protegee?” I echoed. “What do you mean?” 

“Petite Mort,” Jeanette said, sounding a great deal calmer than I felt. “Little Death. A literal translation, I think. You are being groomed for a position, ma petite.” 

I leaned more heavily against the desk and Jeanette’s cool hand. I swore the room was spinning. Hadn’t I had enough surprises for one day? I’d known that Edward wanted me to join up, but I’d never dreamed he wanted me to _replace_ him. 

“He wants me to...” 

Bellona gave me a tight, fierce grin. “Become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

“Or at the very least, the destroyer of some people’s worlds,” I said, breathing shallowly through my nose. I was not going to pass out again. I needed to go one damn day without passing out, throwing up, or being beaten to a bloody pulp. “I told him no already, Bellona. I’m not cut out to be a Horseman.”

She cocked her head to the side, examining me like a curious bird. The smile turned a little wistful but didn’t fade. 

“You don’t think so? I saw you bind Apep with his own skin. He has very few weaknesses, you know. Conventional weaponry does almost nothing unless you aim for the eyes. That she-wolf must be exceptionally powerful to tear the flesh off. I had to have the spear enchanted to do the same. Do you know how goddamn expensive it is to simply subdue that fucking monster? He can’t actually be killed by any means we’ve found. Though we haven’t tried nuclear weapons yet.”

My heart stuttered to a painful halt before resuming double time. “It’s not dead?” 

Bellona shrugged. “It’s primordial. Things that old have auras that can feed off the energy of the earth itself. The best we can do is cage them. That’s part of our job. Kill the things too dangerous to live and contain the things that can’t die in the menagerie.” 

She turned very serious eyes on me, gauging my reaction to her words. The smile grew a little sharper, almost back to the fierce look she’d worn before.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Edward is cold, unfeeling Death. Not you. You’re not in it for the challenge. You’d be...Merciful Death. You could save lives, not take them.” 

I didn’t know what to say to that. Where had this offer been years ago? If he’d come to me with this proposition, with Curtis’ blood still staining my conscience, would I have leaped at the chance? 

No. He had to know I’d be looking for the catch. Tough love was one of the few languages I spoke fluently, so that’s how he communicated with me. It made it easier to glower at Bellona. I was gratified when her smile melted a little at the edges. 

“If your organization is so gosh darn wonderful, how did Apep escape? And how the fuck did it end up here?”

That wiped the smile away at last. Her fingers tightened on the grip of the Seecamp, though she had enough trigger discipline not to place her finger in the guard and risk shooting someone. With a name like War, I had no idea how trigger-happy she was likely to be. 

“An excellent question. Famine was supposed to be guarding the menagerie this quarter. I was sent to check on him when he and his team failed to check in. I found what was left of Bernardo’s team in pieces. He only survived because he locked himself into Apep’s enclosure, assuming it wouldn’t follow him back in. He said a vampire called Apep to its side.” 

Bellona scowled. “He’s either lost his mind or he’s lying. There are no vampires I know of old enough and powerful enough to pit their will against Apep.” 

“There is one,” Jeanette said quietly, going very still as all eyes in the room turned to her. “Though I cannot say why he’d set the snake on my people.” 

“Who?” I asked. 

She took an unnecessary breath and closed her eyes. Her fingers dug into my back just a little, like she wanted a hand to squeeze, but didn’t dare take mine. 

“His name is Mr. Oliver, and he is a council member.” 

Bellona gave a dismissive snort. “We have information on the vampire council. Mr. Oliver is only two thousand years old. Not old enough to capture something like Apep, even if he calls snakes.”

Jeanette smiled wanly. “If you think the Council members flaunt their true names, ages, and powers, you are mistaken. The Master of Beasts is the most recent edition, and he will soon reach four thousand years old. The creator of my line is older still. They lie because they fear new weaponry. They fear that this young, naïve country with its astonishing ability to wage war will find ways to end them, despite their power.” 

“How old is he?” I whispered though I had an inkling I knew the answer. 

“Mr. Oliver is over a million years old.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know in canon LKH has the snake be Wadjet, but that plot point doesn't go very far. I decided to tweak some things, and I really hope you all enjoy it. :)
> 
> Also, in canon America is apparently the only progressive place and Europe is apparently a cesspool of anti-supernatural bigotry...despite the fact that most countries in the EU are pretty liberal. I'm not trying to go too deep into politics, though. Just a heads up if I didn't already say it somewhere in the last two, other nations have it legalized as well. Not all of them, of course, and not every country is happy about it.


	19. Chapter 19

“We have the who,” I muttered as we walked down a narrow corridor toward Jeanette’s quarters. “Now we need the why.”

The soft glow of the track lighting illuminated our path, though I kept my eyes down, mostly. To say I had a problem with small, enclosed spaces was like calling necrotizing fasciitis a minor health complication. A metric ton of immovable earth pressed down on us from above, one accident away from crushing the life out of us. 

The brief Jeanette gave us on the council, was a reeducation in the meaning of terror. Mr. Oliver’s nickname was the Earthmover, for fuck’s sake. One thought, and he could turn the Circus into a crater. It wouldn’t even wind him.

I felt sick to my core, and only the press of Jeanette’s lukewarm body allowed me to drag in each shaking breath. My heart was like a bird loose in my chest cavity, beating its wings hard against the cage of my ribs, trying to get out. She offered what calm she had to share, raising a screen between us to cage her own terror. I could feel it, if I pressed. A beast stirring in deep water, where the blackness was near total. 

“I’m not certain, ma petite,” she murmured. 

Her hand twitched in mine, the motion too limp to be considered a reassuring squeeze. Vampires couldn’t sweat much, but I got the sense Jeanette’s palms would be sticky with the reddish stuff if she’d been capable. This was the most discomposed I’d seen her since our first meeting. 

“You have to have some idea,” I pressed. “You said he requested an audience with you? That didn’t raise any alarm bells?” 

Jeanette’s shoulders rolled in an elegant shrug. A peek at her face revealed nothing about her thoughts. 

“It was odd, yes, but he observed protocol. Belle has been making overtures as well. Masters of major metropolitan areas are tested regularly. I didn’t suspect treachery until another master vampire entered my territory without observing council protocol or presenting the paperwork to abdicate that responsibility.” 

I wanted to shake her and scream, “How couldn’t you have known?” 

My fingers itched with the need to call Edward and form some semblance of a plan. Anything to avoid sitting around for the next day or more with my thumb firmly corked up my ass.

At the end of the day, this enigmatic figure was still a vampire. That meant it had weaknesses, and it was only a matter of exploiting them. But Jeanette had calmly reminded me I’d been up since yesterday morning. So much had happened in the intervening hours that it felt like weeks had flown by. Had the failed assassination attempt really only been twenty-four hours ago? 

Jeanette seemed to catch the tenor of my thoughts as we reached the door. 

“The problem will seem less insurmountable after a bath, sleep, and a good meal.” 

She was right, of course. I’d barely eaten or slept, and trying to face off against a vampire took strength I didn’t have at the moment. 

“I still don’t see why I’m sleeping in your bed. I can rest just as well down the hall.” 

“My suite has an adjoining bathing room. You are welcome to use the public showers if you like, but I thought you might prefer privacy.” 

Her face never wavered from the mask-like calm the older vampires seemed to adopt when stressed. 

I tried to read anything into it, but emotion just seemed to slide from the smooth facade like rain from glass. No anticipation, anger, or anxiety. Even her voice was empty, like she’d already buried everything in the deep with her fear.

It pissed me off. I wanted a handhold, some way to leverage myself out of the miserable mire I found myself in. I shoved the door open and stepped into the dim interior of the room, just to have something to do with my hands.

“I will sleep in the guest room if you like,” she said, still placid, so maddeningly magnanimous in this eleventh-hour crisis. 

Bellona and a cadre of wererats were working to pack a giant primordial serpent into the back of a Mack truck without shifting the enchanted strut of metal from its skull. The Circus of the Damned was in shambles, Stephen and Marguerite would take days to recover from their injuries, and a prehistoric vampire was bent on killing the woman I’d just bound myself to. 

There were reasons to get maudlin and sharing a bed with Jeanette shouldn’t rank among them. We’d done it before. Why did this time feel different? 

Because she’d said I love you. 

During childhood it had been hammered into me. Don’t send mixed messages. Don’t be a tease. And no matter how awful and flawed the logic, it stuck with me. How could I lie down in a bed next to Jeanette, knowing she wanted so much more than I did? How was that fair to either of us?

“Up to you,” I muttered. “But I’m bathing alone, thanks.” 

Jeanette didn’t argue or attempt to follow me inside the bathroom. She pointed out the linen closet and stepped outside, leaving me to remove my outerwear all on my lonesome. The fabric peeled off painfully, sticking in patches of bloodied skin. In the confusion, I hadn’t noticed the scrapes that ran up my back. Now, without the adrenaline or Jeanette’s power running along my skin, I felt every scrape and bruise with unbearable intensity. 

The bathroom was all black marble, with a tub large enough to swallow someone of my proportions with ease. A LED star projector shot glittering silver-white light onto the walls and ceiling where it clung like cosmic glitter. If it weren’t for the silver fixtures, double sinks, and large mirror across from the tub, I could have laid on my back in the water and imagined I was home, floating under the winking night sky. It was strangely comforting to be alone in this room. 

And, of course, she’d known it would be. Damn it.

I perched on the large marble ledge that stretched around the tub. I could probably have laid flat, pressing my skin against all that cool stone. Would blood show against the solid blackness? I doubted it. 

It took less time than I’d imagined for the tub to fill, and I sank into the warm water. The cuts flared to life, digging into my awareness like hot barbs, demanding my full attention. What had scored my back when Jeanette and I went sprawling? The bruises and strained muscles eased after a good soak, which made things tolerable. 

I eased myself onto a small lip near the edge of the tub and lounged, examining the dizzying array of soaps, shampoos, conditioners, bath bombs, and oils that lined the back ledge. Jeanette had a basket of square soaps, all printed with the brand name: _Savon de Marseille_. There were many shampoos and conditioners I didn’t recognize and only one I did. 

_Sinful_ was one of four products in her beauty line. A two-in-one shampoo and conditioner with variations for all hair types. Andria had begged the toffee-scented stuff off her last boyfriend. I didn’t know if she’d acquired _Iniquity_ , _Temptation_ , or _Doxy_. Part of me had always wondered why a sophisticate like Davenay wanted to go about smelling like a candy store castoff. 

Now I knew. You wanted what you couldn’t have. 

It took the better part of an hour to wash my hair and scrub myself clean. Long enough for the water to turn lukewarm and cloud over with soap. Every inch of me was scrubbed clean, except the small of my back. I could still feel blood and dirt caked there, and every attempt to scrape it off stung like a son of a bitch. 

I must have made a pain sound because the door creaked open and Jeanette’s voice filtered through the gap. 

“Are you well, ma petite?” 

“Fine,” I snapped. “Go to sleep.”

“Do not lie. Your blood hangs like perfume in the air. Where are you hurt?”

The door pressed open another inch and her face appeared in the gap. 

“Why? So you can lick it better?” 

“Oh, I’ve offered, ma petite, but you didn’t seem enthused by the prospect.” 

If my cheeks burned any hotter, I’d be flaming. I slid further into the water, praying she hadn’t seen. 

Jeanette slid through the gap, glowing like polished ivory in the darkness of the room. She was dressed, though she wasn’t what Judith would have termed decent. The turquoise kimono-style robe technically covered everything essential. Hell, she’d even tied it closed. Only a hint of cleavage showed, and she appeared to be wearing boy shorts rather than a thong. 

Still, there was something about the way she glided toward me, barefoot, barefaced, and still so breathtakingly beautiful that made me curl in on myself, covering my breasts as well as I could under the circumstances. 

She stopped shy of the tub, her full lips pursed. “I am not a villain here to steal your virtue, Anita. Let me help you.” 

“I don’t need help,” I mumbled. “Get out. I’ll manage on my own.”

“I believe I have been bested at long last,” Jeanette said, punctuating the statement with a light laugh.

I turned my frown on her, but she seemed spectacularly unimpressed. I supposed there was only so long you could remain in a crouched, terrified position, even as a vampire. She’d seen me disabled or in pain too often to buy into the Executioner mystique any longer. Like now, for instance. 

“What are you talking about?”

“I never thought to find anyone more stubbornly proud than I. It’s a feat, to be sure. I’ve been cultivating mine for oh...twenty-five times longer than you’ve been alive.”

The reminder that she was an order of magnitude older than I was did nothing to improve my mood.

“Do you have a point?”

“You cannot stand alone. Even someone as clever and capable as you cannot prevail against all threats. If you cannot ask for help in small matters, you won’t seek it when it matters most. Just ask, ma petite. Surely it is not such a burden?”

My teeth worried at the inside of my cheek until it bled, caustic anger chewing holes in my insides as I grappled with what she’d said. This was so fucking inane. Why couldn’t I just ask?

“There are people I call for backup,” I ground out.

“Edward? Death is a fickle friend, ma petite. He has invested in you, yes, but he would kill you if the price tag made it worth his while. Your erstwhile detective friend will not take your calls. The police now regard you with suspicion during any case involving the undead. You no longer trust your mentor, you dislike your employer, your relationship with your family is strained, and Richard can hardly be called your soulmate. So far as I know, you don’t even see a counselor and haven’t been on medication for years. So, enlighten me. To what or whom do you turn to for support?”

“I have myself. That’s enough. It’s always been enough.”

Her sigh breezed through the room like a warm, sweetly scented wind. The marks allowing her to deceive me again, no doubt. I’d been such a fucking idiot.

“No structure stands forever without care, ma petite. Not even a monolith.” 

The silence fell like a heavy curtain between us, and Jeanette waited patiently on one side of it, waiting for me to pull it aside or banish her to the wings. 

“My back,” I said in a small voice. “I can’t reach the ground-in stuff at the small of my back. Could you...?” 

I lost my nerve halfway through the sentence and let it hang. 

Jeanette merely smiled and glided forward again, bounding off the stepstool near the tub, alighting on the marble lip just behind me. I tensed at the presence of a vampire at my back, years of training goading me toward the Browning in its holster. It was only a few feet away, on the opposite side of the tub, hidden like an incendiary surprise among the multicolored bath bombs. She was so goddamn powerful. Why hadn’t I sensed it before? 

Her touch was cool and perfunctory when she swept my hair over one shoulder. She didn’t kiss or caress my bare back, and her hands didn’t wander. She retrieved the loofah from the edge of the bath and dipped it into the soapy water, running it gently over my back in slow, sweeping strokes. She wasn’t using vampire wiles to cloud my mind, or my cross would have lit up like a Christmas tree. So why did I feel her touch elsewhere? The innocent contact felt like the barest pressure of nails on my skin, sensitizing the flesh so every new touch felt incredible.

And then it was over. Jeanette laid the loofah on the lip of the tub once more and clambered down. She sashayed back out, unbelievably long legs more intriguing than they had any right to be.

I waited in the tub, stewing in what she’d said until I felt dawn burst warm and vibrant over the eastern horizon to towel off and don the ridiculous silk nightie Jeanette had scrounged from one of the female vampires in her Kiss. I waited to cuddle with the rapidly cooling corpse. 

It beat the hell out of jumping the “live” one. 


	20. Chapter 20

I came to consciousness with panic squeezing my heart in one implacable fist and the other closed my throat. I thrashed, trying desperately to get free of the rope that bound my feet, trying to tear the blindfold from my eyes, the gag from my mouth. Blood ran hot and wet from my wrists where I’d rubbed them raw. They were coming. They were coming and I...

Wasn’t trapped in a hunting cabin, listening to the vampires above deciding the best way to kill me. My reason caught up with the rest of me, and I sagged, boneless to the ground. 

My legs were tangled in the duvet I’d dragged off Jeanette’s bed. She’d curled into a ball, knees tucked into her chest, defensive even in her death sleep. The warm down blanket meant jack shit to her while she was dead. She’d grow cold no matter what. No sense in freezing my ass off. I’d stolen most of the throw pillows too, using them to form a lumpy mattress on the stone floor. I didn’t trust myself or Jeanette enough to sleep in the bed. 

I’d been trying to chew through a clump of my own hair and clawing for a blindfold that wasn’t there. The blackness pressed like velvet cloth against my face because we were underground and Jeanette had turned the battery-powered touch lamp off before dying for the day.

I was safe. Well, as safe as I’d ever been. 

Then I realized what had dragged me from my regularly scheduled night terrors. _Weird Science_ , by Oingo Boingo, pumped through my cell’s speakers, jarring me awake. Dr. Hale was calling. 

The clock in the upper right-hand corner read three in the afternoon. I’d slept through the day. Jeanette would be moving around in another hour or two. 

“Shit,” I muttered, fumbling for the phone. 

I was supposed to be idling in an airport parking lot, waiting for her arrival. She was probably wondering where the hell I was.

I caught the call with seconds to spare, lifting the phone to my ear with a frog-like croak of, “Hello?”

“Anita?” Dr. Hale’s voice sounded unsure. “Are you alright? Did I catch you at a bad time?”

I choked on a bitter laugh. She had no fucking idea. Still, I wasn’t about to spew bile at her over the phone. I was the one who’d fucked up, not her.

“I had a late night. Are you still at the airport? I can be there in-”

“It’s fine, Anita. We arrived early. When Rory couldn’t get ahold of you, he rented a Prius, and we contacted RPIT directly. We’ve been sitting with Sergeant Storr for an hour. He’d like you to join us at your earliest convenience.”

I snorted. “That is _so_ not what he said. Let me guess, it was something more like ‘when her highness deigns to grace us with her presence.’”

Dr. Hale’s laugh tinkled over the phone, dainty and musical. “That’s almost verbatim.”

Every muscle I had screamed in protest when I sat up. My back was a mottled sheet of cuts and bruises. My arms burned weakly, my scalp stung, and my tongue felt like sandpaper when I ran it against my aching teeth. Had I somehow knocked one loose?

“Tell him I’ll be there in an hour. The sun will set and we’ll be able to observe them properly.” 

Though it was entirely possible, they were awake now. Eden rose in the middle of the day. So maybe the retrovirus in these corpses could tolerate more sun exposure than the modern strain. 

“We’ll come to you,” Dr. Hale said. “According to the Post-Dispatch, something large and destructive happened at the Circus. Given your track record, I’m assuming you were at the epicenter and that you didn't come away entirely unscathed.” 

I flicked the light on before padding over to the armoire Jeanette didn’t flinch or roll away from the light, and the sight of her curled on the bed made me shiver. It was easy to forget vampires were really corpses, but seeing them after dawn was a good reminder. I was an animator. I knew dead when I saw it. 

I didn’t regret my decision to sleep on the floor. I would not cuddle a corpse. A girl had to have standards. 

“It wasn’t like this in the beginning, you know,” I grumbled. “I didn’t pencil in disasters on Fridays. I had days off. Hell, I had fun every once in a while.” 

Dr. Hale laughed and bid me farewell, typing the address into her GPS and promising me she'd be over shortly.

I scowled at the armoire. There had to be something that fit me. I already looked like I’d been mugged. If I showed up in last night’s clothes, Dolph would demand a full police report. But like hell was I turning up in nothing but the silk nightie and my Nikes. Zerbrowski would snap a picture or two, and I’d become St. Louis PD’s pin-up girl. Not happening. 

The clothing inside was ridiculously expensive, most of it couture. Silk, satin, velvet, and cashmere brushed my hands as I dug. Most of the stuff was meant for women taller and thinner than I was, and I was almost resigned to my old, bloody clothes when I uncovered the sage green wrap dress Jeanette had worn when we’d gone to question Wanda. It had less stitching and personalized measurements than anything I’d encountered thus far. 

The incredibly soft cashmere dress fit. Barely. 

The dress hit Jeanette at the knee which meant it brushed my ankles. My breasts were in danger of escaping the v-neck. I looked like I should sell mead at a Ren Faire. It would have to do. 

The sneakers, wrist sheaths, and Browning went on next, all of it disappearing when I draped a long, forest green princess-cut wool coat over the entire ensemble. 

When I turned to face my reflection in one of her floor-length mirrors, the woman in the mirror grimaced back at me, as unhappy about this development as I was. Zerbrowski would have a field day if I removed the coat.

Nothing for it. We had to gather enough evidence to put Mr. Oliver’s name on a warrant before the fun could really begin. Namely, figuring out how to kill something as powerful as a fucking council member. 

So I dragged my cashmere-clad ass up to the Circus parking lot to wait for Dr. Hale, cursing Jeanette’s impractical wardrobe the entire way. 

***

Within an hour we were heading for a specialized correctional facility outside Saint Louis. It had taken a lot of underhanded deals in Jefferson City to see these sorts of prisons built at all. It was expensive to build therian-grade supermax cells. So much cheaper to allow Executioners deal with the increasing amount of preternatural crime. So far the multi-alloy cable nets were successfully keeping the feral vampires in their concrete cells, but I didn’t count on it as a long-term measure. These vampires had no higher brain function and were incapable of reason. They’d find a way out, and when they did, they’d commit wholesale slaughter.

Dr. Hale didn’t share my reservations. She’d been wriggling excitedly in the Prius’ backseat, surrendering the passenger’s side to me with grace. She looked like a kid on her way to Disneyland. 

“A real Homo Erectus vampire,” she enthused, hands fluttering like nervous butterflies in the air around her face. “It’s an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Thank you for inviting me, Anita.” 

We were alone on a rural road, kicking dust into the windshield of the white news van behind us. Some ambulance chaser had probably sensed a story hovering in the air around the Executioner. If they got into my face, they’d get something alright, but it wasn’t a quote. 

“Dr. Hale,” I began, turning in my seat to face her. 

“Georgia,” she corrected. “We’re peers and you saved my life. You can call me Georgia.” 

“Fine. You know we won’t be able to reason with these vampires, right? They’re feral and the only sane Homo Erectus we know of is behind these murders. If we get a warrant, he’s dead meat.” 

Georgia’s hands stopped fluttering, but she was otherwise undeterred. 

“I know that. Even so, photographs, videos, and autopsies will go a long way in furthering our knowledge of the species. I’m still happy you called me.” 

Well, if she was happy with snapshots and cadavers, far be it from me to correct her. I was shifting to face forward when the news van put on a burst of speed and rammed into the bumper of the Prius. 

“Fuck!” Rory hissed. 

He scrambled, trying to keep us moving forward as we tilted precariously toward the side of the road. The van rammed us again, and this time the back of the tiny, fuel-efficient car bent violently, crumpling like a tin can, punting us into the ditch. My hands formed pale claws around the door handle, and a scream caught in my throat as we came to a violent stop. The ditch was just deep enough to keep the Prius from moving easily. 

That thought filtered through the panic, allowing me to think. That detail was too well-planned to be a coincidence. 

My hands were still fumbling with my safety belt when someone rapped softly on my window. I cursed and glanced up to find a familiar woman bending close enough to fog the glass with her breath. 

The woman’s hair was sleek ebony and bound in a braid that swung to her waist. She was curvy, her halter top displaying a generous amount of cleavage. The snakeskin mini skirt clung like a second skin and stopped around mid-thigh, something the pair of men creeping up to the Prius probably appreciated. 

Her glossy red lips spread into a smirk as she drew a pistol from the matching snakeskin purse. 

“Looks like you’ve had an accident,” she said mildly. “Let us give you a lift. I _insist_.”


	21. Chapter 21

It was a tight squeeze, even with the extra space in the back of the news van. The blonde man and the tall, skinny black man piled into the front while Melanie ushered us into the back at gunpoint. Rory and I sat on one side of the van, while Melanie took up a position across from us. She’d tugged Dr. Hale half onto her lap, the gun held at an angle that would obliterate the good doctor's heart if she pulled the trigger. Dr. Hale seemed to grasp it too, because she remained still, even when Melanie smoothed a hand over her face, across her neck, and down her arms. 

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Melanie asked. 

I wasn’t sure who she was addressing. The pair up front were busy steering us back onto the road, taking a slight right turn onto a dirt path that led away into the countryside. Her brother was probably the wrong person to ask, and I didn’t look at women that way. 

Well...I only seemed to look at _one_ woman that way. I found Dr. Hale about as sexually appealing as my step-sister Andria, though I definitely preferred Dr. Hale’s company.

Melanie smiled, and a dark, forked tongue flicked from between long, curved fangs to touch the side of Dr. Hale’s face. Georgia whimpered and squirmed as Melanie tongued the side of her face, tasting her skin. 

Those fangs were longer and more curved than any I’d ever seen. I’d seen her in daylight, so couldn’t be undead. So what the hell was she? 

“ _Stesichorus Lamiai,_ ” Dr. Hale said, voice little more than a breathy gasp. 

I stared at our captor and could feel the blood draining out of my face. A lamia. As if we’d needed to add a new wrinkle to the already hopelessly tangled mess we found ourselves in. 

“Are you sure? They’re supposed to be extinct.” 

Then again, the enormous serpent we’d faced at the Circus of the Damned had been nightmare pulled straight from the Paleocene Epoch. Lamia were mewling infants in comparison. They’d emerged from the union of a sentient snake species and the Greek empusa, and they’d been all but wiped out by the Spanish Inquisition. 

Dr. Hale gave a jerky little nod. “Absolutely sure. I saw the scales on her thighs, flanks, and spine where her clothing rode up. The scales have a lot of similarities with those of _Montivipera xanthina_. Very aggressive and prone to biting. They have a gray and black zigzag pattern with keeled dorsal scales. There are some differences of course but-”

Melanie wrapped a long-fingered hand around Dr. Hale’s throat and squeezed until her face turned red. She gave a reproving tut, drowning out the choked sounds Dr. Hale made.

“That’s enough of that. If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut. He doesn’t want you. If he gives me the command, I’ll just...” The lamia snapped her teeth shut inches from Dr. Hale’s throat and chuckled when she tried to squirm from her grasp. “He’s denied me freedom for so long. When I am free, I shall feast. Your skin is tender and young. Not a child, but you’ll do for now.” 

“You’re not eating anyone,” I said, my hands itching for a weapon, any weapon. Rory’s Glock and my Browning and knives were resting in the passenger’s seat of the Prius. The veneer of respectable news van went only skin deep, leaving the walls heartlessly smooth. There was no equipment to throw, no cords to form a garote, nothing blunt or heavy enough to deter an advancing Lamia.

Melanie’s amused expression didn’t waver. She was leaving smudges of red lipstick on Dr. Hale’s neck, laughing every time she jerked in surprise or discomfort. The lamia was very careful of her fangs, even as she sneered at me. 

“Oh, you think so?” 

“You’re a snake,” I pointed out. “At least partially. It means Mr. Oliver has been keeping you in check. If you’d been out killing children this entire time, a mob of angry villagers would have killed you centuries ago. He doesn’t want you eating people.”

Melanie’s eyes went flat and cold. “I told him sending Apep was a bad idea, you know. It tipped our hand too early.” 

“Why is he doing this? What’s the end goal?” 

I’d had little time to process things, but the question always came back to “why?” Why St. Louis? Someone with Mr. Oliver’s power and influence could have taken over any territory. Hell, he could probably topple the entire _state_. There were bigger, more influential metropolitan areas. Why not Chicago, LA, or New York? What did St. Louis have that he couldn’t find anywhere else? 

I refused to believe I was the sole draw. There wasn’t anything inherently special about me, nothing that I could do for Mr. Oliver that Dr. Hale wasn’t equally or more equipped to handle. 

Melanie didn’t answer, shifting Dr. Hale a few inches on her lap so she could run her forked tongue across the nape of Georgia’s neck. Rory was trembling with the effort it took not to hurl himself across the aisle to save his sister. Attacking the lamia in a moving car was only going to get Dr. Hale killed. 

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Rory whispered, hand lifting from his lap like he might reach across to touch his sister’s face. 

Dr. Hale’s eyes were wet, her smile tremulous. She nodded, but not as if she believed him. He might get her out of the van, but Dr. Hale and I both knew how unlikely survival was. Even if we escaped the van, we still had to outpace a Lamia on foot. We faced a conundrum. Try to escape and die, or arrive at the secondary location, where she and Rory were even less likely to survive. 

If Mr. Oliver wanted me, it stood to reason I was the only one who could charge the lamia without fear of reprisal. But how to get Dr. Hale out of the line of fire? 

I was still stewing over the question when we pulled to a stop. A peek through the wire mesh that separated us from the front revealed a tiny sod house so overgrown it almost blended with the surrounding hillocks. Only a moss-covered door and a window stood out from the greenery, and even that became indistinguishable when Melanie’s men cut the headlights, plunging us into inky darkness. The sun had finally sunk completely below the horizon, and the first stars were showing. 

The blonde tugged open the back doors, a flashlight clenched between his teeth. He handed the light off to his comrade and offered a hand to me first. 

“Go on,” Melanie purred. “My boys are exceptionally well-trained. He’ll escort you to the door like a perfect gentleman.” 

“Right,” I muttered, taking the blonde’s hand. 

I noted that Rory wasn’t offered the same courtesy and had to climb out on shaking legs all on his lonesome. Melanie stepped out last, setting Dr. Hale down between the black man and the blonde, so she could take the former’s arm. It wasn’t much of an opening, but I’d take it.

Blonde must have had some martial arts training because he saw the first kick coming. He dodged and came back with a right hook that might have laid me out flat if I’d been a second slower. As it was, he overbalanced, and it was easier to maneuver him into a basic throw. I put every ounce of strength I had into the move and was shocked at just how large a dent he made in the van's side. It looked like an elk had charged it.

I didn’t have long to celebrate, though. 

“Anita, watch out!” Dr. Hale shouted. 

I spun just in time to see the lamia’s legs fuse, rippling with the gray and black scale pattern Dr. Hale mentioned. Damn, she was observant. I’d been focused on the gun, she’d been scouring the lamia’s body for clues. I was glad she was on my side. With some training, and just the wrong person guiding her, she’d have been a fucking frightening enemy. I hated chess master types. 

The lamia’s muscular tail flexed as she reared above me. Her fangs grew another inch and a half, dripping putrid yellow venom down her chin, her jaw unhinging to allow for a truly impressive bite radius. She wouldn’t even need the venom to kill her prey. She could tear a head off easily. 

“Enough.” 

The lamia paused, wavering almost comically on the precipice of her strike. She swiveled her torso to look back at the man framed in the narrow doorway. 

He was backlit by firelight, casting a shadow that was much longer than he was tall onto the ground between us. It ran along his bronzed skin, highlighted the high-boned planes of his face, the large, almond-shaped eyes, the narrow nose, full mouth, and the dark, silken fall of his hair. He was shirtless, proudly presenting a very nice torso. Gold glinted at his ears, and beneath the labret. Deliberate scarification and tattoos must have been laid into his skin before he came over as a vampire. It might have been Aztec, but I wasn’t familiar with most Ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Dr. Hale could have probably given a detailed historical analysis if he hadn’t clamped a large hand over her mouth. 

Our eyes met, and his aura slammed into me, staggering me. He was older than almost any vampire I’d ever come across. But...not old enough to be Mr. Oliver. 

“What’s going on here?” I asked. “Who the hell are you?” 

His full mouth curled into an amiable smile, amusement dancing in the warm, earthy brown of his eyes. 

“Mr. Oliver calls me Alejandro. Easier for the mortals to pronounce.” 

“But that’s not your real name, is it?” I asked. 

I’d learned through my talks with Jeanette that you accepted a vampire’s name. It didn’t matter what they’d been in life, the name they chose defined them, and they only altered it to suit the needs of the culture they entered. But this vampire didn’t seem overly attached to his current name, and I was curious. 

His smile broadened, lips pulling back to reveal very sharp, very white teeth. 

“I am Tonatiuh. Come sit by my fire, Anita. There’s much to discuss.” 


	22. Chapter 22

Tonatiuh perched on a wooden stool by the fire and indicated I should do the same. I sat reluctantly when it became clear escape wasn’t an option. Once again, Dr. Hale was perched on an enemy’s lap like some life-sized ventriloquist’s doll. The vampire was at least keeping his hands to himself, mostly. The arm he braced around her waist, and the hand around her throat kept her immobile, nothing more, nothing less. He didn’t even peer down the front of Dr. Hale’s blouse. Sad to say, that basic decency earned him points in my book. 

“You don’t need to keep Rory or Georgia hostage. We both know that you’re much stronger than I am. Let them go and we can talk.” 

He smiled faintly, though it didn’t touch his eyes. He looked careworn, something I didn’t see a lot in vampires.

“Oh, but I do. You have the soul of an Eagle Warrior. If I release your friends, you will fight tooth and nail to kill me and mine, even if the cost is your own life. It’s admirable but foolish. I want to preserve your life, not take it.” 

“Is that so?”

Tonatiuh seemed to find the thick note of skepticism in my tone amusing. 

“What reason would I have to lie to you?” 

My eyes rolled skyward. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you’re in league with the vampire trying to kill me?”

“Those were Oliver’s designs, not mine. He seeks to conquer this city. I’d be content to settle elsewhere, so long as I have you at my side.”

I tried to focus on the first part of the statement, rather than the squirm-inducing second half. If I’d been the one on his lap, I had a feeling he’d have been more handsy. What exactly had I done to attract so many vampires? It seemed like I couldn’t go two feet without knocking into a bloodsucker who wanted to control me. I opened my mouth, but instead of telling him to go fuck himself I said;

“Why does Mr. Oliver want to conquer St. Louis? Like you said, there are other cities.” 

Tonatiuh’s gaze didn’t leave the fire, but his lips pulled back from his teeth in another pleased smile. Glad someone was happy. I was fighting hard not to writhe right out of my skin. His energy felt therian, not vampire. Heat that promised to blister my skin, and humidity so thick I could almost drink it. It was more than an illusion or vampire wiles. Something completely foreign to my animating ability. He was something... more. 

“Not to be deterred, I see.” 

“Answer the damn question,” I snapped. 

Tonatiuh chuckled, and the sound vibrated deep in my bones. It felt familiar to me, somehow, though I was sure I’d never met him. 

“Mr. Oliver is among the handful of the council that opposed legalization when it was first proposed by Roosevelt. He thinks we’ll outnumber the chattel at some point, and the fear isn’t totally invalid. Malcolm’s grand experiment has created a host of undead globally. Unfettered breeding will end in disaster for all involved.” 

I had a feeling I knew where this was going, but it still didn’t explain why St. Louis, or why Jeanette was targeted.

“So he’s... what? Trying to stir up anti-vampire sentiment by starting a war between Humans First and the Vampire Council?” 

“You’re thinking too small,” he said, freeing one hand so he could tap lightly at his forehead. “Really think, Anita. Why else would he strike here?” 

“Supply lines,” Dr. Hale said, voice barely audible, face a rictus of terror. “The Corn Belt stretches from the Great Lakes Region down through Missouri, and Kansas is one of the nation’s largest wheat producers. There are three major crops within this region, and if his influence spreads, he could put a stranglehold on food production. And that isn’t even accounting for the factory farms in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and Kansas.” 

“Oh fuck,” I breathed. 

Mr. Oliver didn’t even have to claim the Midwest. Just the threat of it would bring the entire nation down on him, unraveling any progress the vampires had made. We’d be catapulted back to the dark ages when even being too pale could earn you the side-eye, where the law had very little oversight, and being guilty of vampirism in the first degree earned you a holy water baptism at best, and immolation at worst. 

“And what’s more,” Tonatiuh continued. “St. Louis is home to the poster children for mainstream vampirism. Miss Davenay, with her cult of personality, and Malcolm with his church. If they can be blood-oathed, well...” 

He trailed off, amused by the look on my face. I’d thought my mouth had been swinging in the wind before. 

Good fucking God. 

If Mr. Oliver controlled Jeanette and Malcolm, he controlled most of the nation’s vampires. And through those vampires, their therian servants, animals to call, and any resources at their disposal. The violence could go on without end, therians attacking in daylight hours and vampires stalking the night. It’d be a goddamn bloodbath. 

“Why are you telling me this? Why not hand me over to Mr. Oliver?” 

Once Mr. Oliver got his hands on Jeanette’s human servant, it was all over but the shouting. 

Tonatiuh considered me with a frown.

“You think I want to aid the very Council that oppressed my people? The Council that spread their virus to subdue any creature they could not kill? The ones who financed the men who brought disease to our lands, who slaughtered our warriors, raped our women, ransacked our holy places? The Council who banished Quetzalcoatl? Who bound me, Itzpapalotl, and others?”

“I don’t understand. You’re serving under one of them.” 

“A means to an end. There is only one member of the Council I will not tear to pieces when the time comes. Tiamat, the Dragon, at least understands. She was turned by one of the old ones as well. She rages against the loss of her wings. The ancient strains were powerful enough to bind even gods and beasts, separating them from their power. She can never be what she once was.”

“So it’s true?” Dr. Hale asked. “I’d thought it was a rumor that the older strains could infect therian and other non-humans.”

Tonatiuh’s grip tightened on her waist, his smile growing a touch bitter. 

“It drags gods low, snips the wings from dragons, and drains the life from faeries. It is a blight, and we will put an end to it one day.” 

He finally turned the full gravity of his eyes on me, and I leaned away, wobbling on the stool. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see what lay in the depths of his dark eyes. It could feel his will pulling at mine, as inevitable as the movement of the earth, turning the world toward sunrise. Even a vampire of his age shouldn’t have this kind of power. 

“Look at me, Anita.” 

“No. I don’t know what the fuck you want, but I’m not giving it to you.” 

“I want you, Anita. The blood of the Mexica runs in your veins. The power of Mictlantecuhtli is yours to wield. You are descended from one of his priestesses, I am certain of that. I know the power of my people.”

“Animating isn’t confined to bloodlines,” I snapped, though the fact I was ogling the wall somewhat ruined the effect. “And it has nothing to do with gods! Psychic ability can manifest in anyone. I’m not even the most powerful animator in the room.”

“Animating is a psychic ability, but necromancy is something else entirely. Necromancy is drawn from the eternal dark, and very few have the strength. Dr. Hale is admirable, but not blood of my blood. Look at me, Anita, or I’ll tear her throat out.”

It wasn’t Dr. Hale’s shocked intake of breath that broke me. It was the agonized sound Rory made from the back of the room. He’d been silent through most of the conversation, held at gunpoint by the lamia’s harem. Melanie was watching our exchange with rapt attention, occasionally running her forked tongue over her curved fangs, as if she was contemplating which of us to eat first. 

I’d made the same sound as Phillip tried to suck in air through his ruined throat. I’d made the wrong call, and he’d died pointlessly, drowning in his own blood. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be the death of Georgia Hale. I lifted my gaze and met her eyes for a painful half-second, watched tears trail down her pale, freckled cheeks to collect in her collar. 

Then my gaze shifted to the vampire’s infuriatingly smug expression, and our eyes locked. His smile remained fixed, even as the world fell away around us, scalding my eyes like I was staring down the sun. Points of golden light appeared in the air above my eyes, blazing like miniature suns in the room's interior. I vaguely remembered something like this happening in a dream during the District Serial Case when Jeanette had marked me.

Marks. He was trying to mark me. Fuck. Was it even possible for one vampire to steal another’s human servant? 

“No,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure if I said it out loud or not. I felt my body distantly, but couldn’t force myself to move. “No, I won’t. You can’t take me.” 

I wasn’t thrilled with being a human servant, but if I had to have a master, better the one I knew than the one I didn’t. 

“Help me!” I shouted, unsure if I was screaming uselessly into a void. The light descended on me, white-gold and hot enough to peel my skin off my bones. “Please help me!” 

Tonatiuh’s power closed around me like a superheated iron band. I couldn’t feel Jeanette, couldn’t see Dr. Hale, couldn’t make my body move. It was like metaphysical claustrophobia, knowing I couldn’t wiggle my way free. A scream formed, but I couldn’t find my mouth to give voice to it. 

And then a soft hand slid into mine, too small to belong to the Aztec vampire. Dr. Hale’s mental voice was barely a whisper above the roar of his power but grew louder the longer we touched. 

“Hold on, Anita,” she said. “Just hold on to me.” 

Then Arctic power ran over my skin, the cold biting deep, just as painful as the scorching heat. I found my mouth at last and screamed. I screamed loud and long as Dr. Hale’s power kindled my necromancy. I screamed in defiance, clutching her hand in a vise grip as blackness stole in to erase the golden-white light of his power. A chill wind swept through the room carrying the scent of rain and jasmine like thick perfume. 

And then the dark crashed over us all.


	23. Chapter 23

_In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep._

Genesis 1:1-2. Just one of many scriptures Grandma Flores demanded I memorize as she trained me to suppress my gifts. I knew what should logically follow.

_And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters._

But nothing in this void had been touched by any God I worshiped. The sky would have been indistinguishable from water, if not for the faint sloshing as waves hit some distant shore. The God I knew had never stared into this darkness and brought light forth. 

We hit the water below, and there was an instant of heart-stopping cold, where every breath felt like inhaling bits of glass. The taste of blood chased away the cloying jasmine flavor that coated my mouth and nose, so closely twined with the darkness as to be indistinguishable from it. The darkness was everywhere, rising above us like some great wave before it crashed onto our heads, pushing us down, down, down into a deeper darkness still. 

Dr. Hale’s grip was steely, her nails biting into the skin of my wrist until she’d gouged bloody crescents and, even so, she didn’t let go. Though I couldn’t see her move, I sensed it, sensed the power she was using to buoy us out of the depths. It was barely a dinghy in the vast, thrumming malevolence, but it was something. I clung to it and to her with every ounce of will I had left. 

Light and breath returned in painful increments, each shallow inhale a reminder that I’d taken a lot of physical and metaphysical damage over the course of just a few days. If by some miracle we survived, I’d have to cash in any remaining PTO. Bert would love that. 

At first, the light was only a lick of flame in the darkness, but as we drifted closer, I could make out the golden outline of trees, silhouetted against a roaring bonfire. The flame shot over a hundred feet into the air, dwarfing even the tallest trees. Smoke curled from the fire and was swallowed by the black, starless sky above. 

We hit the shore and crawled on our bellies through the muck toward the source of the light. Last I’d heard, Marmee Noir was only stirring, her consciousness not yet roused from her epochs-long sleep. Still, _something_ watched us from the dark. We crawled, hands still linked toward the light because we knew, somewhere in our primal hindbrain, that the light was all that kept the dark and her many servants from devouring us. 

Dr. Hale tugged me to a stop at the edge of the trees. The light from the fire cast shadows that writhed unnaturally, dark tendrils whipping furiously at the air. For an instant, I could have sworn I saw a man in a red Punchinello mask standing feet away. Then the shadows shifted, and the figure disappeared, probably loping through the trees toward the throng of creatures gathered around the bonfire. 

I tried to find the figure again, but staring at the shifting crowd for too long made my head ache. Too many disparate shapes. Horns, hooves, tentacles, wings. Stomping things, slithering things, things that spat, things that sang, things that screamed. For every ten things I could put a name to, there were at least twenty I couldn’t.

“No further,” she panted. “I stop here when this nightmare crops up. It...it ends better that way.”

My eyes bugged, and I struggled to keep my voice low when I asked, “This is your _nightmare_?” 

All these years, I’d been a pansy, waking in a cold sweat from a dream about one corpse and a handful of enormous cats.

“The night terrors began after my ability emerged. I was thirteen,” she said.

The tremors began in her hands and spread outward. I settled into a dip between tree roots and pulled her into my side. I knew better than to do more when she was upset, but I offered her my warmth, my body as a momentary shield against the dark. The shakes had nothing to do with the cold. In reality, we were sitting next to a fire, insulated from the elements by sod walls. There were some things you didn’t do. Like leaving a friend to shudder alone in the wasteland of a primordial goddess’ power. 

“I have nightmares about her too,” I whispered. “Though it’s not like this. This is...what the hell is this, do you know?”

“The great-grandaddy of the Bacchanalia? You know, before the Romans made it PC?” she ventured with a semi-hysterical laugh. “God, I don’t know. I’ve looked into it over the years, believe me. I’ve got theories, but none of them fit perfectly. I just know that they’re manifestations of evil. Do you see the ones closest to the fire? They’re the least destructive. The farther you get from the light, the worse they become. And the things that wait in the dark...” 

Dr. Hale lapsed back into violent shudders, and we huddled together on the edge between the light and impenetrable darkness. She buried her face in my shoulder and quietly went to pieces. I held her, staring out at the throng of moving bodies, cataloging anything I could recognize. One of the shape near the middle stood out. 

Tall, nude, and strikingly beautiful, she moved with a wild sort of abandon, gliding through the crowd with practiced ease. Muscles glided beneath her bronzed skin as she danced, her sleek auburn hair trailing behind her like a fox's tail. She shifted forms between one gyration and the next, shifting her body like mist to form a slender brindle-furred wolf. 

“Raina,” I muttered. 

Somehow it made sense she was here. I darted a glance around, trying to locate any other wolves I knew, but it appeared to be only Raina dancing around the towering bonfire.

It was easier to focus on just one shape, so I tracked her progress through the crowd. Another roll of hips and she was human again, spinning like an ecstatic child, and then she was shifting again. 

Only his time she’d become a coyote. 

I blinked a few times, sure I’d imagined it, but no, there was a coyote where she’d been standing. Raina’s human body reemerged, laughing, spinning, seeping to smoke, and then... a bear. A cougar. A fox. 

“What the hell?” I muttered, leaning forward for closer inspection, cursing when the blackness washed away, bringing us back to the warm sod house and its blazing fire. One more question and no fucking answers. Typical. 

Dr. Hale stood up straight, wrenching from Tonatiuh’s slack grip. The others wore vacant expressions, and stirred to life slowly, like a dreamer reluctantly emerging from sleep. It was probably our only chance. 

“Out to the car,” I ordered. 

“But Rory-“

“I’ve got him.”

I tore across the room as Tonatiuh stirred, plowing through the lamia’s harem to get to Rory, seizing the weapon hanging loosely in the tall, black man’s hands, and looting the blonde's jacket pockets. Then I seized Rory by the shoulders, dragging him toward the door, narrowly escaping the lamia’s ungainly strike. 

“Where’s Georgia? What are we doing? What’s going on?”

“In order? Georgia is safe in the van, for now, we are running like hell, and I have no fucking idea.” 

Rory choked on a laugh as we reached the van. I passed him the keys. 

“You drive,” I said, climbing into the passenger’s seat and belting myself in before I pressed the stock of my stolen weapon into my shoulder, sighting my first target. “I’ve got shotgun.” 


	24. Chapter 24

The cashmere dress and safety belt rode up around my thighs as I shifted to lean out the passenger window. The belt didn’t do me much good in this position. Being flung through the windshield would probably be a more merciful end than whatever Tonatiuh and Mr. Oliver would devise, but it was the principle of the thing. Years of wondering what might have happened if my mother survived the accident had carved a bone-deep need for that reassurance, even if it was a flimsy assurance. 

It became glaringly obvious that Rory’s experience driving a stick shift was limited to non-existent. He was still fumbling with the gearshift when the lamia’s men emerged from the sod house, their mistress in hot pursuit. They swayed on their feet, like a pair of men staggering from the bar after last call. They were slow, and Blondie’s grip on sidearm pistol was loose. Even the lamia seemed a little discomposed.

But it was too good to last. Whatever miracle Georgia had yanked from the nearest handy orifice was wearing off. All three sobered quickly, and they looked pissed. 

“Get this thing moving!” I snapped. 

“I’m trying,” Rory said, voice rising through a few octaves as he desperately began yanking on the gearshift. “I’ve never driven stick! Not all of us grew up in Missouri’s rural backwash driving rusted out-pickup trucks!” 

The lamia and her men were closing the distance. We were in shooting range already, and soon the lamia would be close enough to strike. The physical capabilities of the lamia were pure speculation, and the subject of heated debate between my graduating class. Was the species closest to a hereditary reptilian therianthropy strain, or was it closer to the demon-like empusa? 

The only questions I wanted answered were: Did she have the strength to topple the cargo van, and could her fangs slash the tires? Either would abort this escape attempt before it started.

“You have three seconds to figure it out, or I’m going to- “ I began.

The van’s innards sent up a horrible grinding scream, and we lurched away from the sod house, back toward the road. The large-caliber bullet blew the side mirror straight off, a rain of plastic and glass shards trailing to earth as we began our slow and clumsy escape. I leaned my torso further out the open window and fired on the shooter.

The shotgun blast echoed like a thunderclap in the night air, driving spikes of agony into both my ears. I hated shooting without proper protection, and these days, it seemed like that was all I did. I should probably sew a pair of earplugs into a pocket on every shirt, skirt, blouse, or dress I owned just to save time. But that sort of precaution was like throwing my arms into the air and admitting that the situation Jeanette had pulled me into wasn’t just a violent interlude. It meant admitting it was my life now, and that things would never return to the way they’d been. So I hadn’t brought earplugs for spite. 

Damn it. 

Shotguns aren’t precision instruments. The double-barrel shotgun was developed in 1875 and was a favorite for coaches and trains because of its versatility, short learning curve, and impressive kill power. At this range, I’d have to actively try _not_ to hit Blondie. 

The blast caught him squarely in the chest, arresting his forward motion, sending him stumbling into the path of the others. I’d been aiming for his head, hoping whatever buckshot didn’t blow through him would catch his pal and at least injure his lady love. Rory’s abysmal driving had shifted my shot enough that Blondie took the brunt of the buckshot. I glimpsed the wound before we lurched forward and away from the others. Buckshot ripped into him mercilessly, shredding his shirt as red burst over his chest. Bone glinted white through flesh roughly the consistency of hamburger before he slumped into a bloody heap, half-disappearing under the lamia’s shifting coils. 

“Ronald!” she shrieked.

Melanie reared back, keeping her weight off the dying man. The tip of her muscular tail brushed almost tenderly across his pale cheek, tapping insistently like someone trying to wake a sleeper. 

“Ronald, get up my love!” 

She was pleading, loud and slightly hysterical, shaking him with increasing vigor. He didn’t stir. The black man strode past his fallen friend and his mistress, pulling something from the interior of his jacket. He whipped it over his head like a cowl, hiding his face from view. It was milky and almost translucent, shifting easily in the wind like a plastic bag. 

Then the shape settled onto his back and fused, gray and black scales rippling over any exposed skin. His face scrunched, narrowing some places, elongating in others. His legs fused together, and he fell onto his belly, lifting his torso into the air in a position almost identical to Melanie’s. I squeezed the trigger, frantically trying to halt the transformation, unloading the only shot I had left into his torso. 

Too little, too late. The van lurched another few feet, and the shot went wide. What little reached the snake-man clattered off his newfound scales and disappeared into the brush. 

“What the fuck is going on? How did he manage that?” Rory demanded, spinning the wheel frantically. 

“It’s a talisman. They’re usually constructed from skins or pelts, and they’re enchanted to allow the wearer to transform into the animal it was taken from. I’m betting that’s one of Melanie’s discarded skins, so it should only be a partial transformation.” 

Which was still a lot more snake than I liked in my bad guys. 

I set the mostly useless shotgun aside, searching for any spare ammo the lamia's men might have stashed away. Here was hoping the shells were in the glovebox and not in the black man's pocket. 

The brief but fervent search didn't turn up any shells but I did find a Ruger LCP in the glove box. I’d have preferred a shotgun or an AR, given what we were up against, but it was better than nothing. I was willing to bet that even a lamia wouldn’t shrug off six .380 rounds to the face.

Rory was still gibbering as we reached the road, his mouth continuing to run in an effort not to scream, probably.

“That’s got to be illegal, right?” 

“Very illegal,” I confirmed, leaning out the window so I could keep both the lamia and newly transformed man-snake in view. The ride was getting smoother, thank God, but we weren’t going fast. “On the bounds of animal cruelty, for one. In most of the rituals I’ve seen, the animal has to be alive during the harvesting process. It’s banned in most of the U.S. with some exceptions for religious practices. Even then, you have to have permits and a shit-ton of oversight. Not that I think Melanie gives a damn.” 

When I swiveled to face our pursuers again, the lamia was slithering toward us, upper body rearing like a cobra. She moved with smooth, serpentine grace, her powerful tail scything through the browning grass, her forked tongue flicking at the air furiously. Her fangs were fully extended again, jaw unhinged, maw spread wide enough I could see every slope and ridge on the roof of her mouth. 

Rory finally got a handle of things and spun the car a few feet from the small footpath and onto the pavement, just as the lamia lunged for the van, hands outstretched, teeth bared. She managed to clip the back window, and cracks spider-webbed out from the point of impact. 

I couldn’t see Dr. Hale from my vantage point, but I caught a very soft whimper from the back. I was actually a little proud of how she was handling things. Dr. Hale had a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome. The upside was an obsessive focus on her chosen fields and hitherto unheard-of animating power. We’d spoken about it over the phone once or twice. 

The downside? Increased sensitivity to sound and a general inability to handle chaos. The last time she’d been near a firefight, she’d gone to pieces. She could have been doing it now, but I couldn’t crane my neck to see. Not if I wanted to keep the lamia and snake-man in sight. Now I was doubly sorry I hadn’t brought ear protection. At the very least, I could have given the plugs to Georgia and directed her to lie back and visualize anything else. 

We were outdistancing the lamia and her beau. Even the fastest snake in the world couldn’t keep up with the speeds we were doing. It seemed the lamia could move about twice as fast as the Black Mamba, but that only meant she’d be speeding in a school zone. The van could go almost four times as fast as the lamia’s top speed. 

The sod house began to shrink in the side mirror, and bits of me began to unclench. That was until Tonatiuh emerged from the sod house and stood with his arms extended toward the heavens. At this distance I couldn’t hear what he said but, in the amber light spilling from the doorway, I could see the result. 

Four tawny shapes swooped down from the sky and circled once above Tonatiuh before spreading their wings wide, streaking toward us with brassy cries of defiance. Golden eagles, twice the size of any I’d seen in the wild. Possibly a therianthrope strain. It didn’t really matter, anyway. A Golden Eagle had a max speed of eighty miles an hour and controlled by a vampire, it would have only one objective. If one got through the van’s windows, we were dead. 

With a curse, I withdrew the Ruger, buzzed the window up, unbuckled my belt, and motioned Rory to pull over. If our only option was to run, I wanted to be behind the wheel. At least I knew what the hell I was doing. Rory obligingly pulled the van to a halt, at least managing not to send up another wave of grinding complaints from the engine. 

He was forced to climb over me to reach the passenger’s seat. Under less frightening circumstances I might have enjoyed it, just a little. Rory was fairly well-built under all the layers, his face charming in a boyish kind of way. With the mop of red hair, he reminded me a lot of Larry, my baby-faced junior animator. Someone you could picture getting to know over coffee. But there never would be a chance to get to know Rory, or anyone else for that matter, if we didn’t escape the supposed Aztec God turned vampire. 

One of the eagles struck the back windshield, and tempered glass showered into the back, drawing a shriek from Dr. Hale. I offered the Ruger to Rory. 

“Shoot anything that tries to come through the back.” 

He nodded grimly and gave the gun a cursory inspection before using the seat to steady his shooting arm. Both Georgia and Rory had earned points in my mental ledger. They hadn’t signed up for this, but they were rolling with the punches. Adaptability was more important when facing off against vampires than book knowledge. 

“How far away is the correctional facility?” he asked in a tight whisper as another of the eagles dived for the back glass. A little of the eagle’s blood tinged the broken bits of glass that still hung on one side of the frame. It seemed like the eagles were willing to commit to a kamikaze dive if need be. 

“Five minutes or less.” 

We just had to make it to the correctional facility and the throng of police and correctional officers guarding it. Cross tie-tacks and other faith-based objects were standard issue police gear. At the very least, we should be able to keep Tonatiuh at bay. The lamia and her snake-man might balk in the face of dozens of police. 

We’d just rounded a sharp corner onto a bridge that looked over a deep ravine when shapes appeared in the sweep of our headlights. Two men, supporting a third between them, all slathered in blood. I laid the brake flat against the floor and ended up leaning against the wheel to stop the car just shy of the group. My heart beat like a trapped bird, throwing itself against my ribs violently to escape. Rory had been flung painfully into the dash, the Ruger thankfully pointed harmlessly up, his finger out of the trigger guard. 

The lead figure raised his head a fraction, and I recognized him, even through the layer of blood and grime. His dark hair going a little gray at the temples, and half of his curls had been plastered to his head, a line of scarlet trickling down to cover one hazel eye. His wire-rimmed spectacles were smashed, and his lip was swollen. On his other side was a young man, one of the new recruits. I didn’t know much about him, except that he had ambitions to graduate to a federal marshal someday. A fringe of dirty blonde hair flopped into one blacked eye, and his lean muscles strained his dress shirt as he struggled to keep his half of their payload upright. 

“Zerbrowski!” 

I had my belt undone and was out of the van before I had time to think. Zerbrowski glanced up from the man hunched between them, and his eyes brightened for an instant when he saw me approaching. 

He let out a low, half-hearted wolf-whistle as he scanned my inappropriate wardrobe. He smiled, but there wasn’t much life in his tone when he said, 

“Did you name your breasts Elphaba? Cause they’re defying gravity.” 

Breath left me in a relieved gust. He couldn’t be too badly hurt if he was cracking jokes. 

“What happened?” 

“Vampire, I think. The entire building started shaking and then bricks began raining down on our heads. I caught one to the side of the head, and I was one of the lucky ones. Most of the facility just collapsed after the vampire strolled in and freed the feral vamps from their cages. I don’t know how many of our people got out. Dolph tried to go back in for the others and...” 

Zerbrowski glanced down at the hunched shape between them. Now that I was closer, I could make out Dolph’s distinctive profile. What was left of it, anyway. His skin was mottled with bruises, his nose looked like a mashed tomato, and blood dribbled out of his mouth. More spots of crimson bloomed like sanguine flowers through the crisp white dress shirt he wore. His chest was still moving. Barely. 

“Let’s get him in the back. As soon as we hit civilization again, we’ll call an ambulance.”

With Brice, Zerbrowski, and I each supporting a piece of Dolph, we scooted the big man onto the flat carpeted bed of the cargo van. Brice clambered in after him, crouching near Dolph’s head. Zerbrowski was just climbing in after them both when a low, mellifluous voice spoke from the darkness.

“I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere.” 

The speaker stepped into view. He was maybe an inch shorter than I was. Small for a Homo Sapien male. Even a little short for a man millions of years ago. His hair was wavy, and a nice warm brown. It had been styled to hide the sloping forehead and prominent brow ridges that would make him stand out in a crowd. His eyes were a curiously bright amber that tried to sucker me the second I looked into them. 

Shapes moved just beyond the slanting light of the headlights, and I had a sinking feeling I knew what they were, and who this man must be. I sprinted for the driver’s side, knowing somewhere deep down it would be too late. 

Mr. Oliver’s thin lips spread in a smile when I jammed the key into the ignition and threw the car into reverse. He called over the roar of the engine and the furious beating of my heart. 

“I apologize for this, Ms. Blake. It’s nothing personal.” 

The ground cracked, pushing the thick slab of asphalt upward like it was spring-loaded, catapulting the van over the guardrail. For a moment we were in freefall, tumbling end over end toward the narrow ravine below. 

_This is how I die. Spinning off the road. Just like mom._

The van struck rock. There was a sickening crunch, my head whipped forward into the expanding airbag, and then...

Blackness. 


	25. Chapter 25

The blackness was womb-like, swaddling me in warmth. I was curled close to the sound of a beating heart, assured I was safe and that nothing could touch me here. 

Occasionally memory and sensation would come back to me. The warmth of a mug between my small, pudgy fingers. My mother singing softly over me. Pressing a cookie cutter into dough. Listening with rapt attention while she and dad curled on the couch and told stories about meeting at a masquerade ball during college. Bright, happy recollections, though some memories that stole through weren’t mine. 

Jeanette, holding her babies for the first time. Jeanette, hair free of its restrictive updo, running barefoot, giggling as she danced by moonlight. Jeanette doing needlepoint while a pair of men sat playing chess. And later that night, when she sat with her hand clutching the edge of the bed, naked and bathed in firelight. The two men reached for her, one dark-haired, the other fair, both incredibly beautiful, both nude. I caught snippets of their lovemaking, but mostly? I felt her joy. I could have stayed floating forever, content with the memories of happier times, even if Jeanette’s thoughts and feelings were part of the bargain. 

But life’s a bitch, and the happy interlude couldn’t last. The blackness dissolved to a staticky gray, and then finally a bright light as I surfaced from the dream. 

I opened my eyes, and even that small action hurt. Lifting my head sent railroad spikes of agony into my temples, and I groaned as my head settled back onto a flat pillow. 

“Easy. Don’t sit up,” Zerbrowski’s voice said from my left. “The doctors said the drugs they used could give you a blinder of a headache.” 

I didn’t sit up, but I turned my head toward his voice. I had to blink a few times to bring the room into focus and saw almost exactly what I expected to see. The walls were painted white, the furniture a familiar, non-threatening beige I’d become accustomed to after more than a dozen hospital trips. 

Someone had pulled one of the reclining chairs to my bedside and Zerbrowski had settled in, draping one of the rough-spun hospital blankets over his lap. His hair was sleep-tousled, sticking up in every direction. The blood and grime had been washed away to reveal a smattering of bruises and shallow lacerations. One arm was tucked close to his body and held in a sling. Dark circles formed half-moons under his eyes. 

“You look like shit,” I croaked. 

Zerbrowski gave me a brief, sardonic smile. “You don’t exactly look like a glamor model yourself, Anita.” 

“Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to see you this side of heaven.” 

“Neither did I,” Zerbrowski said. Something in his expression grew a touch darker. Not like he was unhappy, exactly. Discomfited maybe. 

“What happened?” 

“The van hit head-down. Everyone in the back got tossed around, but no one has anything worse than a compound fracture. Most of Dolph’s injuries occurred before the crash. He’s touch and go, but the doctors think he’ll pull through. You two up front weren’t so lucky.”

The ache began somewhere behind my breastbone. Rory hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. I knew what that meant.

“Rory Hale’s airbag didn’t deploy properly, and he was flung through the windshield into the creek at the bottom of the ravine. The body still hasn’t been recovered.” 

My eyes squeezed shut and burned furiously as I struggled not to cry. If the body hadn’t been found there was technically a chance he could turn up alive. But I doubted it. If the trip through the windshield and into the rock face hadn’t killed him, then drop into the freezing creek below had probably done the job. He’d either broken his neck on impact, or he’d drowned. I wasn’t sure which was worse, and it wouldn’t matter a whit to Dr. Hale. 

Georgia, I corrected myself. She’d asked me to call her Georgia. It was the least I could do after I’d gotten her brother killed. 

Zerbrowski continued softly when I opened my eyes, watching my face as he spoke. 

“Your airbag deployed, which is probably the only reason you didn’t end up at the bottom of the ravine with him. As it was, the doctors weren’t sure what was going to kill you first, your ruptured spleen or the intracranial swelling. Even if you pulled through that, the crush injuries should have cost you at least one of your legs. But here you are, three days later, and the worst you have to show for it is a concussion.” 

I stared at him for a few seconds, stunned. “Three days?” 

Zerbrowski rolled his eyes. He was wearing his spare pair of tortoiseshell glasses. They were grossly out of date, a holdover from his college days when he thought that reading and looking like Aldous Huxley would help him score with the Literature Majors. It had worked...a little. Katie had taken pity on him when they’d gotten lost, and scoured the dorm, holding his hand so he wouldn’t crash into walls the entire time. 

“I tell you that you’re a goddamn medical miracle and _that’s_ what you focus on?” 

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Don’t be sorry. Explain what the fuck is going on, Anita. The doctors have run your blood work over and over. You’re healing like a therianthrope without a trace of a virus to explain the speed healing.” 

I forced myself to sit up, gritting my teeth to cage an agonized moan as the medication and concussion combined tried to pile drive me back to the mattress. 

“Jeanette, if I had to guess. She’s probably fed every hour she was conscious for the last three days. She can shunt the energy my way if I’m injured. She did it earlier this week after the courthouse incident.” 

Zerbrowski’s eyes narrowed. “No human can lose that much blood, Anita. Are you saying she’s killing people to save your life?” 

To save her skin and mine? Maybe. But somehow I didn’t think it had come to that. 

“Therian blood has more of a kick to it, and they can donate more regularly. And besides, she’s a celebrity. It’s not like she’s going to have difficulty finding donors. All she’d have to do is make an announcement on Facebook, and she’d probably have a couple hundred people beating down her door. I think anemia may be a new fashion statement in St. Louis, but no, I don’t think she’s killed anyone.” 

I didn’t mention Jeanette’s other feeding options aloud. If I admitted I had what amounted to a succubus for a vampire master, the innuendos and double entendres would triple. I’d never hear the end of it. RPIT would spin elaborate tales of my lesbian escapades with the lascivious Master of St. Louis. My bet was that Jeanette had literally fucked me back to health. Maybe I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the idea. 

Zerbrowski settled back into his seat. He looked exhausted. 

“Not that I don’t appreciate it, but have you been sitting by my bedside this whole time?” 

Zerbrowski shook his head. “We’ve been taking it in shifts. Those of us that are still left, that is.” 

The ache in my chest doubled, and the burn just behind my eyes returned with a vengeance. I’d almost forgotten about the building collapse. 

“How many people did we lose?” 

Technically I was only a consultant, not a cop, but Zerbrowski didn’t correct me. His face crumpled, and I braced myself for the worst. He scrubbed at his face to disguise the tear that trickled down one cheek.

“Five of our people and all the inmates at the facility, save those feral vamps. Falling debris crushed Roberto, Marconi, Taggart, Smith, and O'Brein. Tammy escaped before the building collapsed, but Clive’s busted up pretty badly. The doctors have him in a medically induced coma and they say it could go either way at this point. His church group is clustered outside his room, praying. We’re going to need a lot of that, considering.” 

My stomach did an uneasy somersault. “Considering what?” 

“Considering what that fucking bastard is doing to my town. There has been a rash of Humans First members turned across the Midwest, and we put the pieces together three days too late. Most of them seemed to be missing person cases, which is why we didn’t immediately connect them to our victims. He has hundreds of those things, and they’ve been committing wholesale slaughter. The governor called the national guard, but a giant snake is blocking all avenues in and out of St. Louis.” 

“Snake?” I repeated, stomach sinking further. 

Bellona was supposed to have taken it back to the enigmatic menagerie days ago. I hadn’t really believed her when she said the thing was unkillable. Now the thing was loose, terrorizing St. Louis. 

“Yes. A fucking monster right out of myth. From the footage we’ve been able to compile, we think it started at around forty feet. After it took a dip in the water it grew. Now its coils are wrapped around the city. We can’t find anything to penetrate its scales. The national guard has fired goddamn missiles at it and they only seem to piss it off. They can't even risk air-dropping supplies. The vampire behind this has St. Louis by the balls.”

He gave me very serious eyes, and his lips pressed into a hard, angry line. 

“Everyone’s looking to RPIT for answers, and with Dolph and Clive out of commission, I’m in charge. I only have two men on active duty. I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with, but I’m betting you do. You know the monsters, and you always know more about the Master of the City than you let on. Stop freezing me out, Anita, I’m fucking begging you. What is this? How do I stop it?” 

A queasy feeling of shame joined the hard pit of fear in my stomach. He was right. I had been freezing RPIT out, too pissed at Dolph to share, and too chickenshit to admit to what I’d been a party to over the last few months and now it had gotten people killed. Between the snake and the feral vamps, the death toll had to be high. 

I was betting it was a national headline by now. Officials somewhere in D.C. were probably debating whether to drop a nuke on St. Louis before the enormous, nigh-indestructible snake could cut a swath through the rest of the country. Mr. Oliver was doing a damn good job of striking the fear of vampires into the American people. 

I pulled in a shaky breath and met his stare, doing my best not to flinch. 

“The snake is called Apep, and I only learned about it yesterday.” I paused, frowned, and then amended. “Four days ago, I guess. It was delivered to the Circus of the Damned as a part of a new animal act, and it attacked the performers and carnival workers. It looked pretty damn dead when we were through with it. I guess we were wrong.” 

“Why did it attack the Circus? Why not start terrorizing St. Louis immediately?” 

I shrugged. “The vampire controlling it is a Council Member who seems intent on derailing vampire rights. He’s after Jeanette specifically. If he can blood oath her, he can turn the image of a respectable mainstreamer into a bloodthirsty tyrant. She’ll be a puppet leader, taking the brunt of the backlash while he remains anonymous.” 

Zerbrowski’s expression grew more irate with every word, finger clutching the armrest of his chair until his knuckles turned white. The rigid mask of anger looked wrong on a face more prone to sardonic smirks and lewd grins. His next words came out through clenched teeth.

“Why the fuck didn’t you call me the second you learned about this?” 

“I was going to-” I began, hating the quaver in my voice.

“Bullshit!” One hand lifted from the arm of his chair to slap against the upholstered armrest. “That’s complete and total bullshit! Don’t you dare sit there looking hurt and try to claim you’d have told me! You had more than enough time. All it would have taken is one phone call to one of us, and you didn’t bother. You were so certain we couldn’t handle the truth, and now people are dead. If you can’t be arsed to tell the goddamn police when there’s a potential threat on the loose, I guess you don’t really respect us. If you can’t trust us, we can’t trust you. Assuming any of us survive this clusterfuck, you can count yourself off the Taskforce.” 

The words struck me like a physical blow, driving the air from my lungs. My head ached viciously, and the tears I’d been struggling against finally spilled over. He couldn’t mean it. He was just angry and under pressure. He’d change his mind when we came out of this alive. 

_If_ we came out of it alive. 

Zerbrowski stood, seizing his jacket from the back of his chair, sweeping toward the front of the room. 

“Where are you going?” I whispered. 

“To find your doctor. I’m going to see if he’ll clear you for discharge. For now, RPIT still needs you to liaise with the monsters. You’re taking me to the Master of St. Louis and we’re coordinating a plan of attack. There has to be a way to kill this bastard and his pet snake.” 

He took three steps and disappeared into the hall, leaving me staring bleary-eyed at where he’d been only a second before. 

I couldn’t seem to stop the tears once they’d started. All I could do is tug my knees up to my chest and wrap my tube-riddled arms around them clumsily. I hid my face until the tears finally petered out. 

When I was sure the crying jag was through, I hit the call button and waited for the nurse to arrive, begging a box of Kleenex and a cell phone off her. She warned me she’d be back in a few minutes to check on me. I agreed. I only needed a few minutes. I punched the number in with trembling fingers and waited. 

Edward answered on the first ring. 

“Guess you’re still alive,” he said mildly. He seemed utterly neutral, like he wouldn’t have minded if things had gone the other way. 

“No thanks to you. I heard your pet monster escaped the zoo.” 

“Yep. Bellona fucked up spectacularly, though he’s trying to pass the buck to Bernardo. Thought they’d end up killing each other before Van Cleef stepped in.” 

I sucked in a deep breath and counted until I was sure I wouldn’t scream. Grandma Blake had helpfully pointed out “motherfucker” had the same cadence as “Mississippi.” 

One motherfucker, two motherfucker...

“And you don’t think you should do something about it? You’re the only ones that can stop it, after all.” 

“We hear a certain vampire is trying to make his kind illegal again. The higher-ups don’t think it’s a bad idea. More call for our services if all the bad little vampires have to go into hiding. I think we’re going to sit back and watch.” He paused for effect. “Unless you have a counteroffer? Something to make interference worthwhile?”

I knew what he wanted me to say. 

“I’m not joining Van Cleef’s organization, but I could... owe him a favor. One mission. You could even consider it a trial run. A chance to woo me.” 

I could hear Edward’s smug smile over the phone. I wanted to reach through the receiver to slap it away.

“That’s what I like to hear, sugar. Text me your location and Uncle Eddie will be by soon to talk details.” 

I gave an exaggerated gag. “ _Never_ call yourself my uncle again.” 

“How about daddy?” he teased and laughed when I really did gag.

I hung up, cutting him off mid-chuckle, wiping at my still streaming eyes. I’d finally struck my bargain with the devil. 

Here was hoping it paid off.


	26. Chapter 26

The doctor did eventually clear me to leave, though it took much cajoling from Zerbrowski. The headache eased by degrees with the liberal application of over-the-counter painkillers and some caffeine. I spent the time checking in on Georgia and the remaining members of RPIT. Every visit was gut-wrenching in its own unique way. Physically, Georgia had gotten off easy with a few broken fingers and deep tissue bruising. 

But when I’d stepped into the room, she didn’t turn to acknowledge me. Her gaze never left the ceiling, and she kept repeating the same thing over and over in a broken whisper. 

“He’s gone. He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone...” 

I backed out quickly and shuffled away as fast as my IV stand would allow. Clive and Dolph were further down the hall, the silent vigil of cops conspicuously absent. No time to stand guard over a fallen brother when there was a catastrophe of biblical proportions literally bearing down on the city.

I couldn’t force myself to stay long. They were both too still, looking somehow diminished lying on the sterile white sheets, tangled in tubes. The visit with Arnet didn’t go much better. She lunged off the bed, almost ripping the IV from her arm as she tried to rush me. The string of shouted expletives followed me down the hall. 

I knew I deserved everything Zerbrowski and Arnet said. I deserved worse, and I stewed in that knowledge during the drive across the city to the Circus of the Damned. The streets were empty and only the distant wails of sirens and the occasional scream broke the silence. A light had been fixed to the top of Zerbrowski’s Dodge Charger, spinning pulses of ultraviolet light into the dark. 

“The feral vamps and snake don’t seem to like UV rays much. It’s no substitute for daylight, but it’s the only measure we’ve found to keep the vampires from attacking households. The governor has imposed martial law. Stores are distributing UV lights free of charge under police supervision and only emergency personnel are allowed on the streets at night.” 

“It makes sense. Apep was the embodiment of chaos in Egyptian myth, and he opposed the sun god Ra. Has anyone tried exposing it to UV light?” 

“Repeatedly. Twelve people have died attempting it.” 

I shut my mouth and didn’t speak the rest of the way to the Circus. 

*** 

I was surprised to find the Circus’ parking lot packed with cars when we pulled into one of the reserved spaces. With a giant snake looming above the city and martial law in place, business had no doubt been slow. 

A pair of men flanked the entrance to the Circus and stood at attention when Zerbrowski and I approached. The guard on the right was Hispanic, almost six feet tall, slender, with thick, waving black hair. He watched us with wary dark eyes. He had one hand already inside his bomber jacket, toying with one of his blades for comfort. The man on the opposite side was equally tall, though his dark hair was fine and cut very short. His shoulders were broad, very different from his slim Japanese father. I’d met his family briefly when I’d been towed to a soiree hosted by Jeanette. 

“Fredo. Graham,” I acknowledged, nodding to both. “I need to see Jeanette. Any idea where she is?”

The pair exchanged a glance, but it was Fredo who spoke. “Inside. Who’s the man with you?” 

“Detective Zerbrowski, the current head of the Regional Preternatural Investigation Taskforce. He’s here to speak to the Master of the City. Move.” 

Fredo and Graham hesitated for just a moment before they opened the door and stepped inside ahead of us. I was a little disappointed. I’d been spoiling for a fight and shouting at the pair would have been a teaspoon of sugar to help Zerbrowski’s sour pronouncement go down. 

The air inside the Circus was unbearably warm after the cold walk across the parking lot. Therian energy saturated the air, running like a scalding wave over my skin, barely tempered by the colder power of the vampires. Most of the vampires were young, decades dead or less. Zerbrowski brushed at his arms absently and I had to wonder, yet again, if my former partner might have some aptitude for metaphysics. 

The tents had been torn down, and the concession booths had been shoved to the back of the warehouse to make room for the crowd, and it was barely enough. They’d formed thick lines behind the heads of their wereanimal groups, like school children playing follow the leader. Everyone was craning their necks to see the lone figure on the catwalk above. 

Jeanette stood straight-backed and regal, a queen presiding over her court. She cut an impressive figure in a pair of tight black breeches tucked into calf-high boots of the same color. A white peasant shirt barely showed under a cinched plum bodice. Lace spilled from the cuffs of a midnight dark frock coat. She’d allowed her hair to curl naturally, and it fell around her face in shining ebony waves. She looked like a corsair as imagined by Hollywood.

To the casual observer, she looked composed, entirely sure of herself and her position. Even from this distance, I could see it was a sham. Her back was stiff with barely concealed fear, not perfect assurance. She wasn’t gripping the catwalk rail to peer over the edge, but to keep herself grounded. With the connection wide open and flowing toward me, I felt the mounting terror, the utter hopelessness of her position. 

The crowd parted around us, allowing Zerbrowski and I to wade to the front. We cleared a group of uneasy undead and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Malcolm. I was idly wondering if everyone in the room had migrated here before martial law was imposed, or if they’d flouted it en masse when Fredo caught my attention. He was motioning toward the ladder that led up to the catwalk. 

“She wants you up there,” he said in an undertone, leaning close enough that Zerbrowski wouldn’t hear. “If you hadn’t woken today, she’d have sent someone for you.” 

I eyed the ladder, recalling the last time I’d climbed onto the catwalk. The former Master of St. Louis had threatened to push me over the rail before she’d invaded my mind, dredging up the worst memories I had to offer. But it wasn’t Nikolaos waiting for me on top of the crosswalk. 

“I’m not afraid of no stinkin’ ladder,” I mumbled before grasping the first rung. 

I felt Zerbrowski’s hot, accusatory stare on my back as I climbed. If he’d been capable, I was sure he’d have been climbing up after me, perhaps mollified by the chance to peek up my skirt. 

My head was swimming by the time I reached the top. I was leery of heights at the best of times, and doubly so when I was still suffering the effects of the drugs Dr. Chapman pumped into me during his earnest attempt to save my life. I did my best not to stagger over to Jeanette. Her expression softened as she swept her gaze over me. 

“Thank you for coming, mon ciel étoilé. I know it cannot have been easy. Do you feel well?” 

“I’ll live. I hear I have you to thank for that.” I leaned in and kept my voice low so the listening therians wouldn’t catch my next words. “Did anyone die to make that happen?” 

“Non. Blood and... _flesh_ were given voluntarily.” 

I took a step back from her. “Alright then. Got a plan, Fearless Leader?” 

“We fight,” she said simply and turned to face the crowd below. 

She glanced down when I tangled my fingers with hers, one corner of her mouth lifting in the ghost of a smile. 

“Just in case I pitch forward.” 

Her chuckle was airy and stopped almost the instant it began. “Of course, ma petite.” 

The crowd below was a sea of upturned faces, and every single one wore a look of quiet anxiety. They gazed at Jeanette like she might reach into the sweeping frock coat and produce a miracle. Everyone leaned forward when Jeanette spoke, hanging on every word. 

“A member of the Vampire Council has contacted me to issue an official challenge. He calls himself Mr. Oliver, but many of you will know him as The Earthmover.” 

The crowd below undulated like a wave at sea, the furious whispers sending a jumble of hushed syllables through the room. I couldn’t make out what was being said, but the consensus was clear. They were scared shitless. Jeanette continued, ignoring the continued mutters. 

“His conditions are simple. His forces against mine. He has a hundred or more vampire berserkers at his disposal, another centuries-old vampire and his animals to call, a lamia and her retinue, his therian servant, countless thralls, any animal he can call in the area, and Apep, the Titanoboa currently menacing the city. We negotiated the exclusion of Apep and his earthmoving ability, but every other element remains in play. It is quite possible they outnumber us. I am asking for the therians of St. Louis to step forward to defend the city.” 

“Ordering, you mean,” a tall, handsome vampire near the back drawled. His hair was dark, his skin a medium brown, like he’d once spent a great deal of time in the sun. He was one of the handful of vampires from Nikolaos’ regime that survived the purge. I’d never caught his name. “The wolves are yours to command. Command them.” 

The crowd stirred again, and the muttering grew louder. Jeanette stared the vampire down. 

“I see I haven’t made my policy clear to you, Emaan. I will not force servitude, nor will you.” 

“Liar!” I wasn’t sure which therian shouted it, but soon they were all chiming in. 

“Vampires are always like this!” 

“You want to make us all slaves!” 

“You’re only saying this because there’s a cop in the building!” 

Jeanette had to shout to be heard over the uproar. Her fingers tightened around mine, her grip crushing. 

“I will not force the wolves or any other group to stand by my side in this battle. Any therian who wishes to leave may do so now without fear of reprisal. Any who are not fit for combat, have families, or simply do not wish to fight are welcome to flee the city if you can make your way past the boa. I have contacted Augustine, the Master of Chicago. Any refugees from St. Louis will be given quarter until they can be transported safely to a sanctuary city in Toronto.” 

Jeanette’s face shone with radiant ivory light, her eyes bleeding to midnight blue fire as she swept her gaze over the assembled vampires and therians.

“I have done what is necessary to climb to the top, to amass the sort of power and influence that can shape change. But I know what it is to be the lowest, most maltreated part of this fetid hierarchy that we call governance. I was once like many of you. Small. Helpless. At the mercy of a system where the shit rolls downward and suffocates those at the bottom. I will _not_ allow it in my city. The line must be drawn here. This far and no further. Principles mean nothing if they are not backed by proof. Know this. I will force none of you to die for me. If you wish to go, do so now.” 

At first, no one moved. The tension stretched like a band, ready to snap at any second. Then the first woman darted out the door. She was petite and curvy with a mane of fiery red hair. Others followed in spurts, ducking out in small handfuls at first, then trailing out in a near-constant stream. Emaan joined the group, aiming a last contemptuous sneer in Jeanette’s direction. Even Raina turned on one spectacularly high heel and marched out, taking most of the wolves with her.

Only a handful of wolves remained, all huddled around Richard. Joseph, the Rex of the werelion pride, and his brother stood nearby, the only lions who’d remained after the initial purge. Half the rats still stood behind Rafael, and around a hundred burly men stood behind a slim figure below. My heart sank as I did the math. 

We had maybe two hundred therians. Even including the remaining vampires of the St. Louis Kiss, it was a depressingly small fighting force in the face of what Mr. Oliver brought to bear.

“Are you sure you want to commit this many men to the cause, Narcissa?” Jeanette asked. 

The slender figure cocked one leather-clad hip out, planting a spiked boot into the earth. The riding leathers should have clung, but she was flat where most women curved. A pixie cut that was at odds with the almost masculine curve of her jaw framed a haughty, angular face. She balanced on the point of a knife, neither feminine nor masculine. 

“The hyenas are with you, Mistress.”

Jeanette acknowledged the statement with a nod before turning to the last remaining group.

Around twenty vampires stood behind Malcolm, staring up at Jeanette with silent wonderment. A fierce joy lit Malcolm’s face from within, his robin’s egg blue eyes twin fires in his pale face. 

“Well said, Ms. Davenay,” he murmured. “I fear I may have been wrong about you.” 

“While the speech was very rousing and Matrix-like, I still don’t see how we’re going to win this,” Zerbrowski called. “You have to know we can’t beat this asshole in a fair fight.” 

“Actually,” I began. “I have a plan for that.” 

He quirked a brow. “Go on.” 

I laid out the plan that Edward and I had concocted via text during the hours before I was discharged. Zerbrowski remained skeptical throughout. Everyone was a critic these days. 

“You’re sure that will work?” 

“Nope, but I don’t see that we have many options. Do you think you can do your part?” 

“Does a leprechaun shit gold?” 

I bit my lip, trying not to smile. “Good.” 

Jeanette adjourned the meeting with a few more instructions and leaned wearily on the railing as everyone filtered to the lower levels to prepare. I sank down to her level, placing a hand gingerly on her back. 

“Is there anything I can do?” 

“There is,” she whispered. “You can keep your promise.” 

I frowned. “What do you mean?” 

“After our first kiss, you promised to kill me. If Mr. Oliver prevails, I’m counting on you to keep that promise. I cannot become his stalking horse, Anita. I _refuse_. I won’t let him own me, or any of the vampires I’ve made. If he wins, promise you’ll kill me.” 

Killing her would kill me. I knew that and sympathized. I didn’t want to live under Oliver’s rule either. She was asking me to sign a suicide pact. I should have told her no. Instead, I whispered:

“I promise.” 


	27. Chapter 27

Jeanette was still unnervingly sober and silent as her ragtag army suited up for battle. Claudia had done a quick headcount and reported our current numbers. With Malcolm’s people in the mix, we had around fifty St. Louis vamps pledged to the cause. Only two hundred and fifty therians had remained after the purge, a fifth of the total that had attended the rally. There were therians in the city who hadn't been able to attend the rally and _might_ help if we had time to send word. But the battle was set to take place at the witching hour. It didn’t give us much time to mobilize, and there was still work to be done. 

Three hundred of us versus untold numbers of them. Even if, by some miracle, we won this thing, we were going to lose people. Jeanette knew it too. She scanned the crowd, memorizing each face. Which ones would we bury tomorrow morning? Would there be anything left of us by dawn? Would I be forced to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger? 

It would have been easy in July. Only three months later, and the same action was almost impossible to contemplate. 

It was clear from just a few minutes of observation that most of our hastily constructed army were civilians who’d never seen a gun in real life, let alone fired one. Only a few dozen seemed to know what they were doing. Not enough. It just wasn’t enough. If Edward and Bellona didn’t come through on their end of the deal, we were fucked. 

Most people believed that wereanimals were automatically gifted with strength, speed, and the know-how to use it. The danger of most therians wasn’t in the hunger following a change. It was a temper tantrum, one too many drinks, road rage, rough sex gone wrong. What happened when that thing you’d thrown a hundred times before to blow off steam now had the momentum and precision of a major league pitch and could breeze through drywall? What happened when a punch meant to break a nose caved a person’s face in? What happened when you dislocated shoulders or hips on accident, just because you couldn’t judge your own strength during sex. The human body had inhibitors for a reason, damn it. The therianthropic virus fucked that up. 

Watching them clumsily handle their first weapons made my heart break. They were just people. Brave people who were going to be slaughtered because I hadn’t shared information with the police. Fuck.

A gentle tap on my shoulder made me flinch and spin around, fists already half-raised to counter a strike. Jeanette quirked a brow. 

“Are you going to hit me, ma petite?” 

I dragged in a deep breath through my nose and let it out through my mouth like my therapist had taught me to do years ago. I didn’t really want to go off on Jeanette. She was doing her damndest to do something moral for a change and screaming at her didn’t seem like the proper reward for good behavior. I wasn’t angry at her. The fear of what was coming had needled its way into me, leaving me cold. 

“No. Of course not. I’m just...It’s a lot.” 

She nodded and linked her elbow with mine, leading me toward the back of the room. Most of the others were stocking up from what looked to be a small but well-stocked armory, but at the very back there appeared to be a trunk with my name on it. No one else had touched it. 

“We are going to war. That’s not precisely the same as the skirmishes you have been in thus far, is it? How many vampires or therians have you been forced to battle at the same time? Our simulations do not count.”

I had to really think about it. “By myself, or with backup?” 

“Either.” 

“Twenty vampires, with police and SWAT to assist. An unauthorized kiss was squatting in Bella Vista, Arkansas, picking off tourists and retirees. SWAT did most of the work. I think I only shot two. As for therians...hell, the largest number I faced wasn’t even trying to attack me. My father and I spooked a family of werelynx in the Ozarks while hunting. They were off the grid, so we had no idea it was their territory. Dad talked them down eventually, and we ended up smoking venison at their cabin.” 

Jeanette’s lips curled into a faint smile. “And what is the greatest have you faced down by yourself?” 

Again, I had to think about it. Executioner wasn’t a title you got by standing around and twiddling your thumbs. I’d done a lot of killing, in and out of the morgue. Only a few things stood out to me, though. 

“The hunt for Valentine’s Kiss started as a group effort, but I got separated from the others when things went FUBAR. Four came after me. I killed two for sure, left another for dead, and maimed Valentine. And I tend to only deal with therians one-on-one, if at all. For all people like to say they’re savages, they pale when I compare them to the vampires I’ve been asked to hunt.” 

I couldn’t help a brief glance up to gauge her expression. If the statement offended her, she didn’t let it show. 

“So you’ve never seen war?”

“No,” I muttered, crossing my arms under my breasts. Something about her tone pissed me off. “But I would have if they had allowed me to go through ROTC. I’d probably be serving a tour overseas.” 

Jeanette knelt and unlatched the trunk, though God only knew how she managed it in her getup. 

“I do not mean to impune your honor, ma petite. I am certain you would have been an exemplary soldier. I am merely saying that the average American has not and will never feel the true lawlessness of war. They do not quake at it’s coming. What you’re feeling is natural. Healthy, even. Only a fool rushes to war without fear and you, dear Anita, are no fool.” 

“Glad someone thinks so,” I said, leaning over the crate. 

The bottom of the crate seemed to be rows of neatly folded clothing. Resting on top of a layer of shirts were guns. _A lot_ of guns. Mostly variations on my Browning or Firestar, but there were several semi-automatics I knew how to use but didn’t have a permit to carry concealed. There were cleaning kits, replacement parts, and ammunition cartons aplenty. The contents of this trunk alone could arm around fifty of our people. 

I gave her a questioning look. “What’s all this?” 

Jeanette reached into the interior of the trunk and fished out a gray athletic top, a pair of tactical pants, an overcoat, and a corset that closely resembled hers. She offered them to me with a smile. 

“Battle gear. Put them on.” 

“The shirt and tac pants I’ll wear, but no fucking way am I going to wear a corset and coat. It’s too damn ridiculous.” 

“Everything in this trunk was commissioned with your proclivities in mind, ma petite. The tactical corset accommodates two semi-automatics and one magazine. The tactical pants will allow you to store a great deal of ammunition, and the duty belt I’ll provide will allow for additional weapons placement. There is kevlar in the designs for the coat and corset. It won’t stop a large caliber bullet, but it ought to be proof against small calibers and light damage from knives or claws.” 

For a minute I gaped at her like she’d started spouting dirty limericks in Pig Latin. Svelte and sophisticated Jeanette, spouting technical terms like _Guns and Ammo_ had become her new religion. 

“And you just happened to have this lying around?” 

The smile blossomed across her face, sudden and bright, no less beautiful for the hint of sharp fangs it revealed. 

“I had them designed for you. You never asked to be my servant, and it has put you in a great deal of danger. I know I cannot dissuade you to retreat from battle. It’s simply not in your nature. But I can ensure you are prepared, no matter what the occasion. Most of the formal wear has pockets in the folds of the skirts for blades or small handguns. Often there will be options for gun placement as well. Similar features have been added to the business wear, the athleisure wear, so on and so forth.” 

My chest tightened, and I quashed the sudden, stupid urge to cry. This wasn’t completely altruistic, and I _did not_ go gaga over clothes. 

I snatched the wad of clothing and turned so my back was toward her, discarding my clothing. The stuff I’d scrounged from the hospital lost and found hadn’t been great. My bra and underwear had been cut off by EMTs, and I was sure the wererats on the other side of the room were enjoying the view. I could practically feel Jeanette’s stare on my bare ass as I hurriedly shimmied into the tactical pants. 

“You’re really trying to be the best vampire not-girlfriend ever, aren’t you?” I asked and couldn’t keep the bite out of my words. I didn’t want to feel obligated to her or to cater to her hurt feelings when I didn’t reciprocate the gesture. 

The smile was clear in her voice when she replied, “Is it working?” 

All she got in way of reply was an inarticulate grunt normally only found in middle school boys’ locker rooms. It’d have been more impressive if she hadn’t laughed. 

Thirty minutes later, and everyone was suited up. Anyone who could fire a gun with reasonable accuracy would follow Claudia’s lead during the battle. Any who couldn’t would transition into beast form closer to the battleground and report to Rafael, Narcissa, or Richard. By the time we were through, we’d stuffed a fleet of vehicles full of vampires and therians, ready to ship out at our signal. But there were still a few details to see to before we could meet with Mr. Oliver. 

I gave Jeanette’s hand a brief, impulsive squeeze before she loaded into a Range Rover, squeezing into the middle seat between Fredo and Graham. It left me standing next to Zerbrowski in the Circus entrance, terror dancing a fresh jig in my gut. 

In only a handful of hours, we could all die. 

I reached into the pocket of my tactical pants and withdrew the copy of materials Bellona had sent in a text. Zerbrowski looked skeptical when he read it over. 

“What’s does your friend need this much metal for?” 

“Magic,” I quipped. “Just get it, Zebrowski. She’ll be waiting at the Municipal River Terminal for you.” 

Zerbrowski sighed. “I’ll get it. I just hope you know what you’re doing, Blake.” 

“So do I, Zerbrowski. So the fuck do I.”


	28. Chapter 28

“Do we really need to wear ski masks?” I asked. The thick wool muffled my voice. These stupid things were stiflingly warm and didn’t even have mouthpieces. My nose and chin itched fiercely. 

There were only a handful of cars parked in the St. Louis’ Art Museum’s employee parking lot. All this cloak-and-dagger shit felt like overkill to me. I’d never pulled off a heist, so maybe this was standard protocol. 

Or maybe Edward was amusing himself at my expense. He was damn near inscrutable on the best of days, and with the mask on, I didn’t have a prayer of reading him. 

“Yes, Anita. We need the masks.” 

“Richard’s not wearing a mask,” I continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe he should wear a ski mask too.”

A small smile tugged at my lips when the man in question gave an amused chuff that carried, even over the sound of the idling engine. 

“Richard is a giant-ass wolf currently blocking my view out the back,” Edward said.

He glanced over his shoulder to eye the enormous werewolf in the bed of his pickup. Richard was doing his best to look unobtrusive, crouching low, trying to hide his bulk. Difficult to do when you’re the size of a Dartmoor Pony. He was probably five hundred pounds of solid muscle and every inch a wolf. No one looking at him would mistake him for a dog. 

“You sure know how to pick your dates, Anita. First a vampire, and now a werewolf.” 

I adjusted my ski mask with a grimace he couldn’t see. “You think _now_ is the time to discuss my dating life? You said you didn’t care when we talked things through at my house.” 

Edward eased the pickup into the spot with laser-like precision, even with the lack of visibility. “I said I trusted you to know what you were doing. That doesn’t mean I don’t care. I care a whole hell of a lot, Anita. Trust me.” 

Something Bellona said filtered through my memory, and I weighed my words for a minute before asking the question. 

“Bellona said I was your protegee.” 

The muscles in Edward’s neck bunched for a half-second. It was the only outward signal of stress he gave, and I wouldn’t have caught it if I hadn’t been looking for it. He really was good. Bellona was right. I needed to learn some motherfucking zen. I let my heart rule my head, and it was like telegraphing my moves to my enemies. 

Edward wasn’t just dangerous because he’d gotten a graduate’s degree at badass assassin school. It wasn’t the weapons that made him dangerous. It was the patience, the cold, calculating mind that guided the finger in the trigger guard. 

“And?” he said. 

Cool. Placid. Unflappable. Very Edward.

“And I don’t get it. I’m good at my job, Edward, but I don’t relish it. Not the way you do. I can’t amputate my conscience. I can’t look at a creature and see a dollar sign.” 

Edward leaned into his headrest. It was hard to tell, but I thought he might have been smiling beneath the ski mask. 

“What would you do if lover-boy in the back started mauling kids?” 

I squinted at the side of his face. This had to be a trick question. “I’d shoot him.” 

He nodded. “Even though you like him.” 

“That doesn’t matter. Hypothetically, he was trying to kill people. What does this have to do with anything?” 

Edward held up a finger, and I trailed off with a scowl. I hated it when he went Mr. Miyagi on me. 

“Now, what would you do if it was the Master of Saint Louis?”

“Second verse, same as the first,” I snapped. “Get to the fucking point.” 

“That _is_ the point, Anita. You’d take the shot. Once you’ve committed, you don’t second-guess.” 

“In your scenario, a whole hell of a lot of people would take the shot. Hammer Horror films would have the public believe that vampires and werewolves love to munch on babies. It’s part of the rhetoric that Humans Against Vampires and Humans First love to spout on their web pages. Whoever blew the child-eating monster’s head off would be held up as a big damn hero.” 

He sighed. “You’re getting caught up in the minutiae. You’d take the shot, even if the target were someone you liked. And in your Master's hypothetical case, even when the cost to you is astronomical. Do you know how many people have their opponent dead-to-rights and choke when it comes time to pull the trigger? It’s worse when you know the person. When you’ve shared a life, a family, a friendship, but you could pull the trigger. I count on that. You don’t choke. Not when it matters.” 

“I choked in July!” I snapped. “I choked, and Phillip died.” 

“Like I said. When it matters.”

My voice came out icy when I could finally form words past the screech of furious mental feedback.

“Fuck you! Phillip mattered!” 

He gave me a hard look. “He was a junkie you knew for a day and a half tops. We both know he’d have been in the ground before thirty. You saw his arms. Phillip traded needles and smack for fangs and freak parties. He was already dead inside. He got a chance to grab what remained of his life by the balls and go out like a fucking champ. It was a better end than he deserved.” 

“Some people aren’t lucky enough to have someone there to scrape them together after the worst happens. I had a family. And for some fucking reason, I had you. If you’d found me in an alley with a needle in my arm, would we be having this conversation?” 

Edward was silent for a beat. The weight in the cab shifted with a groan as Richard leaped from the truck bed and landed almost soundlessly on the paved lot. 

“Yes.” 

“Why? What the fuck do you see in me, Edward?”

“A better me,” he said. 

Then, without a word or a backward glance, he undid his safety belt, reached for his duffel of supplies, and exited, leaving me staring blankly at his empty seat. 


	29. Chapter 29

“You should have killed them,” Edward said, voice low enough that only Richard and I would hear. 

We were making our way steadily through one of the traveling exhibits, walking toe to heel, making almost no noise. Richard’s footfalls were muted, with only the occasional scrape of a claw on tile to give away his position. He was unusually light on his feet for a wolf of his size and looked like some sort of dark omen, a church grim weaving between the square display cases like headstones.

The museum’s emergency lights had kicked on after the citywide lockdown. Some displays and all major escape routes had just enough light to allow patrons to stagger to an exit. An emerald diadem in the nearest case caught the diffused rays and cast ghostly green light across the room. Richard’s eyes glowed with that light for just an instant. I shivered. 

_Way to disappoint me, 20th Century Fox. This is not what nights at the museum are supposed to look like._

“I’m not going back to kill them, Edward.” 

We’d incapacitated a handful of guards along the way, and each time, Richard would snag the unconscious man or woman’s starched shirt between his enormous teeth and drag them to the exit before returning to guide our little procession. 

“Do you think anyone who’d risked the police and the feral vamps to rob this place would leave those guards alive? It’s suspicious as hell, Anita.” 

“They’re just people, Edward. They probably got caught out and about when Apep started terrorizing the city. I’m willing to bet none of them could make it home and came back here. For all intents and purposes, this _is_ their home now. It has running water, most of the building still has electricity, they have weapons, and their break room probably has food. I won’t punish them for camping out where it’s safe.”

“They might give a description to the police.” 

“And say what? The museum was robbed by a man of medium height wearing a ski mask, a shorter woman in a ski mask, both in trench coats, followed by a big ass wolf? That’s not a police report, Edward. That’s a comedy sketch.”

Edward grunted and began pacing ahead of me. I hadn’t won the argument. He just wasn’t in the mood to debate me. I didn’t press my advantage. There were bigger things to worry about, and he’d given me the last word. When debating ethics with Edward, that was about as good as things got. 

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see where he was coming from. If everything went according to plan, things would go back to business as usual. The museum would open, and someone would eventually think to check the surveillance tapes. This wasn’t a victimless crime. Someone’s insurance would be paying out the nose to replace the value of what we were about to steal. The guards might be fired. A little piece of history was about to be literally ground to dust, and the only consolation for any of it was that this place would be leveled within days if we failed. My looting wouldn’t matter much if everyone was dead. 

Edward came to a stop in front of a small display case. I came to hover around his shoulders, feeling like a nervous girlfriend ogling the stones behind a jewelry counter. 

Curtis had actually taken me to Cartier just after proposing, knowing I’d like to choose a band for myself. I’d balked at the price tags. The cheapest had been a slender white gold ring with a few diamond settings. It’d been three thousand dollars, easily triple what I’d been making working a full-time job as an undergraduate. I hadn’t really looked at the others. I’d staggered out of the store, trying to breathe through the irrational panic choking off my air.

Why? Why the hell had he wanted me? It hadn’t made sense. His mother was threatening to cut him off if he married me, and he wanted to slip a three thousand dollar engagement ring on my finger? What if it broke or slipped into the sink drain? And that wasn’t even touching the price of the wedding band.

He had to be delusional. I wasn’t worth it. I’d eventually forced him to take me to Zales and set the price cap for five hundred dollars. 

Looking at the many glittering gold, diamond, and red beryl settings on the torsade necklace, I felt the same shrinking sense of intimidation. And this time, I didn’t think I’d break it. I _knew_ I’d break it. Various ores, chemicals, and red beryl crushed into powder. Bellona’s shopping list had been baffling until Edward had let me in on the big secret. Now I wished I could unlearn it. It had the potential to get all of us in a heap of trouble, in the unlikely event we survived what was coming.

Zerbrowski was off gathering what could be acquired legally. That left Edward and me to gather the red beryl. Gemstones worth a thousand times more than gold by weight, which could only be found naturally in three places on planet earth. And in only one place in St. Louis. 

We were lucky we’d found any at all. This exhibit moved constantly, and if Mr. Oliver had delayed his attack by even a week, we’d have been scrambling to find something even half so effective. 

“Keep watch, keep clear, and don’t breathe too deeply,” Edward instructed, kneeling by the base of the display case. 

He had his bag open and a vial of something caustic-smelling at the ready. Richard stood, furred shoulders brushing either side of the archway, effectively sealing off the exit. I obediently turned on one heel and strode toward the archway we’d just come through. I kept a grip on the Browning I’d selected from the armory Jeanette had provided, keeping it trained on the ground a few feet ahead of me. Never aim at something you’re not willing to kill. 

Too many idiots watch shoot-’em-up movies or play Grand Theft Auto and think they can wave a gun around like a conductor’s baton. In the movies, the gun always goes off where and when it’s supposed to. They rarely show misfires. They don’t show the innocent people who get hurt because some douchebag wanted to look cool in front of his buddies. I did my best not to loose a round at anything that wasn’t trying to kill me. 

The bearded statue in the next room over seemed like a shifty-eyed bastard, but that didn’t mean he was asking for it. 

I had no idea what Edward was using to free the necklace from its tempered glass and velvet prison, but after only a few minutes of exposure, I wanted to hack my nose off rather than go on breathing it. The scent had to be an order of magnitude worse for Richard, and if I tried, I could make out a faint, canine whimper every minute or two. I trusted Edward’s self-interest enough to know whatever it was wouldn’t gas us all to death. 

Though I wasn’t sure I _could_ be gassed anymore. The third mark came with some nifty benefits, according to Malcolm. Immunity to poisons came in the goodie bag. Shame there was a steep price tag attached. Richard would recover from most things if he had time to shift back into his human form, so only Edward would keel over dead if the stuff in the vial turned out to be toxic.

I’d never know what made me bring the Browning up. Maybe I’d heard something over the whir of the air conditioner or spied something creeping through the shadows toward my position. Or maybe something just tickled the hunter’s senses that Edward had carved into me over the years. 

Whatever it was, it saved my life.

A woman’s lithe upper body sprang at me like it’d been propelled from a Jack-in-the-box, hands outstretched, ready to claw my eyes out. Her raven hair swirled like a dark nimbus around her head, her eyes wild as she lunged for me. I danced back a step, though not quite fast enough to avoid being gouged by her nails. They missed my face by inches, digging shallow furrows into my throat instead. 

Melanie. The lamia had been following us, so I supposed Mr. Oliver hadn’t discovered Tonatiuh’s plan to double-cross him yet.

Before she could come back for a second attempt, I jammed my Browning beneath her chin and pulled the trigger. It snapped her head back, her spine cracking, her hair flaring outward like a dramatic black curtain. But that was all. No blood, bone, or viscera pulsed out of the back of her head to stain the wall. She listed sideways, unable to make her tail move correctly, and slid boneless to the floor. She was punch drunk, but not dead. 

I kicked the lamia onto her back, raising the Browning again to aim at the dark shape shifting in the shadow just beyond the archway. If I had to guess, it was the lamia’s remaining lover.

“No closer or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” 

Melanie coughed weakly and raised her hands in surrender. She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes, and her voice had a slight lisping quality when she spoke. 

“Don’t shoot. Demetri is unarmed.” 

“I’d like to see that for myself, thanks.” I raised my voice so the shadowy Demetri could hear. “Come out with your hands where I can see them.” 

Demetri shuffled into sight, hands laced behind his head like he was expecting to be cuffed. He’d dressed for stealth. Black jeans, a black hoodie, black sneakers, and a ski mask just like mine. He kept his gaze on me, dark eyes glinting with wary fascination. Every so often he’d glance down at Melanie, and his eyes would soften. It didn’t take a genius to know he wanted to go to her. 

“Are you hurt?” he asked in an undertone. 

“You must be new, eh, son? Lamia don’t die that easy.” 

Edward’s voice so near my ear made me jump. I hadn’t heard him approach, too concerned with the downed lamia and her last boy-toy. He came level with me, Sig naked in his hand, pointed at Melanie’s middle. His eyes were firmly fixed on her, an eager sort of hunger etched into his smile. The lamia blanched at the sight of him and curled lower, as though willing the ground to swallow her whole. Edward took a deliberate step forward, and Melanie tried to inch her way back, yelping when she hit the edge of the archway. 

“Lamia are nigh-immortal. They can be hurt, but it takes a whole hell of a lot to kill ‘em. See the middle, where the tail meets the body? It’s like a chink in the armor. Best way to lay one out, but you really need a steel rod through the skull to keep ‘em down for long. Again, it won’t kill them, but it’ll let you get the bitches somewhere quiet.” 

There was an undercurrent to Edward’s words that made me shudder. The lamia was positively trying to flee now, lashing her tail this way and that and getting absolutely nowhere. Demetri half-turned, trying to follow. 

“Don’t move,” he snapped. “Either of you.”

“Fuck you. You and your entire gods-forsaken empire,” Melanie whispered, the venom in her tone more than making up for the lack of volume. “You smell of fouled earth, old blood, and death.” 

Richard let out a soft whine from behind us. A question, I thought. He was confused. Good. That made two of us.

“Edward, what is she talking about?” 

“He’s Order of Lyonesse. I can smell it on him. A millennium-old cult of narrow-minded, limp-dicked butchers that kill what they can’t understand. It runs in families. Bet daddy told you how to skin a lamia when you were still in pull-ups.” 

“ _Ran_ in families, actually. Most of the major lines died out a long time ago. The Order has been enlisting people since the...oh...around the time of the Revolution? A while now. And I’ll have you know I was well out of pull-ups by the time I learned to skin one of your kind. Think it was a little after I was discharged.”

My head ached. It was hard to breathe or even think in the stinking interior of the room. As illuminating as this little spat was, we didn’t have time for it. 

Melanie’s tail wriggled and then, with a sickening slurp, came apart, forming two long, slender legs. The lamia got to all fours, prostrating herself at my feet. 

“I came to ask for asylum. Please, Ms. Blake.” 

I rubbed at the side of my throat, and my fingers came away slick with blood. I waved them in her direction. 

“You’re not exactly endearing yourself to me, Melanie.” 

She shuddered. “I thought I could barter safe passage with your vampire master. I didn’t know one of the Order would be with you. Please. I must preserve Demetri. If you won’t grant asylum to me, allow him to live. I can’t lose him as well.” 

I glanced sideways at Edward. He was still staring at the lamia, that chilly smile never fading. 

“You really think Mr. Oliver is going to lose?” 

Melanie hesitated. “I cannot be certain. I know that Tonatiuh plans to undermine him during the battle in hopes of preserving you. You broke free of him once already. You could do it again. And if, by happenstance, you had a weapon that could send his essence back to the seal...” 

“You’re covering your bases,” I said with a short, bitter laugh. “If Tonatiuh dies, you’re in the clear no matter who wins. Mr. Oliver will never know you were double-crossing him. And if Jeanette wins, you have an in with the reigning master vampire. She owns a Circus, and you’d look great on a poster. She’s pragmatic enough to let you live for that reason alone.”

Her shoulders hunched forward, all the fight seeping out of her. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

“And why should I trust you?” 

“Trust my self-preservation instinct, Ms. Blake. I am the last of my kind. As your butcher friend says, we are nigh-immortal. We can only die by our own hands. Do you have any idea what tortures have to be inflicted on us to make us choose it? The Order taught the Inquisition the technique. He would take me and visit horrors upon me you can only imagine. My skin would be priceless to his people. I will pledge anything to remain out of their hands.” 

“Is it true, Edward? Do your people torture them to death?” 

Edward shrugged. “It’s the only way to end lamia for good. Every fucking one of them is a party to murder. Lamia have to consume a steady diet of human kids to procreate. Children died to bring her onto this dusty sphere, and she’ll have to kill if she wants kids.” 

Maybe he had a point, but the thought of turning her over to Edward made me queasy. 

“You can help us kill Tonatiuh?” I asked.

“I can help you send his essence back to the seal. I’m not sure it’s possible to kill him outright.” 

“Seal?” 

“A copy of the Seal of Solomon. The Conquistadors bound the Aztec gods behind a seal. It was a common tactic for many centuries. Steal a people’s gods, slaughter their leaders, demoralize their people. If you destroy his body, I believe his essence will be bound along with the others.” 

“Gods, schmods,” Edward drawled. “Gods ain’t nothing but a term for long-lived, jumped-up psychics and non-humans with cults of personality. Tonatiuh was... a sun god if my Great Courses subscription is to be believed. Probably just a firebug. Quetzalcoatl? A dragon with delusions of grandeur. Human belief gave them power, and if you’re worshiped long enough, you buy into your own hype.” 

Melanie’s hands balled into fists, but she kept her head down, still huddled on the ground before me. 

“I have the obsidian dagger that belonged to his consort and first human servant, Nochtli. It can sever his essence from the vampire body. For your purposes, that’s as good as dead. Please.” 

I glanced from the groveling woman to Edward and then back again. 

“Fine. If we win, I’ll make sure you live. No one will touch you. Not even Edward.” 

Edward’s lips curled up another half-inch. “You think you can stop me?” 

“You think I’m going to repay the favor I owe if I’m dead? Because you’ll have to step over my corpse to take her.” 

“Damn it, Anita! Don’t be such a drama queen. You can’t let her live.” 

“I can, and I am. Melanie will not raise a hand, tail, or tooth against anyone unless they’re trying to kill her first. She will remain childless, and she will do what Jeanette asks of her. Within reason.”

Melanie’s voice came out on a sob. 

“Yes. Yes, of course. I promise. Thank you, Ms. Blake.”

“Thank me if we win. The night’s still young.” 

I holstered the Browning and turned to Edward. 

“You’re not touching her, Edward. Promise me.” 

He sighed. “Not unless she gives me cause. But if she sticks that dagger in your back, don’t come crying to me.”

“Fine. Do you have the necklace?” 

Edward reached into his pocket and tugged out the glittering strand. My stomach clenched hard. This whole ordeal was going to give me an ulcer. I needed to have a talk with him if we made it through the night. 

“Got it.” 

I reached back to pat Richard’s neck. The fur at his ruff was a little musky but surprisingly soft. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was petting a dog. It helped center me, just a little.

“Melanie and Demetri will ride in the bed of the truck. Can you keep an eye on them, Richard?”

He huffed, and his warm breath ruffled the hairs at the base of my neck. I smiled. 

“Good. Let’s get going. We’re burning moonlight.” 


	30. Chapter 30

“Good fucking God,” Edward swore, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What took a shit in the river?” 

I breathed shallowly through my mouth, using my wadded up ski mask to cover my nose. Big muddy rivers like the Mississippi collected filth, so the Municipal River Terminal smelled a little fishy on a good day. Now the scent rolling off the river was fetid. Something was dead. Maybe a lot of somethings. 

“That’d be Apep,” I said. “A disturbance that huge probably churned the river. If Zerbrowski’s team can take him out, I’m betting that boaters will close a lot of missing person cases. Plenty of bodies get tangled in growth at the bottom. There’s no telling how badly Apep’s mere presence has fucked up the local ecosystem.” 

I snapped my mouth shut before I could start screaming at him. Some enterprising journalists had defied the governor’s mandate and crept to the riverfront during daylight hours to snap photos of the wreckage Apep left in his wake. There’d been hundreds of boats floating like crumpled tin cans on the Mississippi. How many people had jumped ship before their boats were destroyed? How many of those had been snapped up by Apep before they could swim to shore? 

Why hadn’t this mysterious Order of Lyonesse done more to contain the snake? Why not keep a spear in its head twenty-four-seven, if they knew it was capable of something like this? 

The Municipal River Terminal was now almost entirely cloaked in shadow. That was by design. Authorities had quickly learned that Apep was attracted to light. Homes near the Riverfront had been evacuated and their power cut. The coast guard had been playing a game of chicken with Apep for days, shining UV spotlights onto the beastie when it moved into a position to attack a new section of the Riverfront. During the daytime, they had erected rough concrete barriers in the hot zones. Everyone and their brother were sporting infrared or night vision goggles. God help the poor bastard who whipped out a flashlight. 

“I think we have bigger things to worry about, Anita.” 

He was right, but it chafed against some buried part of me. I’d grown up around animals. Dad had been a veterinarian for almost twenty years now. Andria was following in his footsteps, though she was four years away from actually getting a degree in veterinary medicine. I’d gone to school fully intending to do work in conservation at some point. Perhaps not initially, but later in life, after I’d served a tour or two. 

Now it all seemed like a pipe dream. I’d known I’d never be normal, but I’d never expected _this_. 

Two men stood guard at the mouth of a squat office building. It was impossible to tell the finer details of their appearance through the night vision goggles. Every image was composed of smudged shadows and sickly green light. They were both short and compact, built like sturdy squares. Their pale suits only leant to the impression, large shoulder pads adding unnecessary bulk to their frames. They glowered at us as we approached, only relaxing against their sections of wall when they spied Edward at my side. 

“Blaine,” Edward acknowledged, nodding to the one on the left. “Barry. Please tell me Bellona’s inside. I don’t have time to drag her ass out of hiding.” 

Ah. So these were the swanmanes Edward had mentioned. Blaine and Berry Brewster. Swan Mafia.

“She’s here,” Blaine said. His Chicago accent was thick enough to spread on toast. His generous mouth turned down in a frown. “So’s one of St. Louis’s finest. Why’d you drag a Jake into things?” 

“Face it. This clusterfuck is beyond our control. Play nice, or get the hell out.” 

The pair leaned more heavily against the wall, sulking. Neither made a move to stop us as we mounted the handful of stairs to the office door and stepped inside. 

The scant furniture had been pushed to one side of the office to accommodate Bellona’s supplies. Dark slabs of metal were arrayed around the interior of the room. Silver was lashed to steel bars with copper wire. Zerbrowski stood off to the side, eyeing the whole thing with bemusement. 

“Finally,” Bellona huffed, snatching the Tupperware container of red beryl dust from Edward the second he was within arm’s reach. “What took you so fucking long?” 

“Complications. This was all we could find and grind on short notice. Will it do?” 

Bellona examined the fine layer of dust at the bottom of the container, pursing her lips in displeasure. 

“Only just. It’s not going to stand up long term if Apep gets ornery.” 

“But you can do it?” 

“Of course I can do it. I’m a motherfucking treasure. Now stand back and let War work, kiddies.” 

I swallowed a smart-aleck retort. Human eyes hadn’t seen anything like this in close to a century. I was genuinely curious and didn’t want to get booted out for running my mouth. 

I came to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Zerbrowski. He took a step away from me, putting inches between us. 

“Come on,” I said under my breath. “You can’t even stand next to me?” 

Zerbrowski didn’t answer. I couldn’t see his eyes through the night-vision goggles he wore, but I got the sense he was glaring at me. 

Bellona pried the lid off the Tupperware container and walked the room, dusting mish-mashed piles of metal with the beryl with the precision and focus a master baker would envy. 

“What the hell is she doing?” Zerbrowski muttered under his breath. 

“Like I said. Magic.” 

“What I’m about to do technically violates state and federal law,” Bellona said offhandedly. “So I’d appreciate it if you could keep this to yourself, Detective. I’d rather not end up in the bowels of a government building churning out gold.” 

“What the-” Zerbrowski began. Then he trailed off, as Bellona stepped forward and waved a hand over the metal piles. 

Immediately they twisted, spitting and hissing as the silver and copper melted and ran onto the thick steel bars. They gleamed for a few precious seconds before the steel swallowed copper, silver, and beryl like dry, cracked earth. The steel shrank in on itself, thinning and curving wickedly at one end. 

But as fascinating as the process was, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Bellona for long. Her skin began to glow, softly at first, then with more intensity. By the time she was through, she flared with brilliant, searing light, like she’d swallowed a burning star and it was trying to leak out her pores. I could barely make her out through the goggles’ filter. Still, I tried. 

Her features sharpened, her eyes glowing with an inhuman light. Through my goggles, they appeared as three different shades of green. Peridot at the center, shining jade in the middle, and a deep, winking emerald to ring the lighter green. No doubt the color was darker if I’d been able to see her cast in daylight, but the effect was still dazzling. 

“My God,” Zerbrowski breathed. “She’s an alchemist. A faerie.” 

“A changeling, actually,” Bellona panted, letting her arms fall limply to her sides. “Probably a fourth or an eighth faerie. But yes, I _am_ an alchemist. Keep it to yourself.” 

Zerbrowski opened his mouth like he’d say something flippant, then closed it, and shook his head. 

“This is nuts. I feel like I should have myself committed.” 

“You and me both,” I said. 

Zerbrowski gave me a hard look. I’d been earning those a lot lately. 

“Where do you find these people?” 

“Generally they find me.” 

Zerbrowski shook his head again, muttered something to himself, and then strode out of the room. He’d reached his threshold for freaky shit. 

I knelt and examined Bellona’s work. “Harpoons?” 

She smirked. “Seems appropriate. We’re looking to spear this Dick, aren’t we?”

“We’ll try all things and achieve what we can,” I said with a shrug. 

“Literate. Much better than the last one you groomed, Edward. I really do like her.” 

“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Edward said, pushing away from the wall. He’d busied himself with closing shutters and drawing drapes to hide the glow. He seemed thoroughly unimpressed by the light show. 

“You’re an asshole.”

“And you’re a bitch,” he shot back. 

“Can it,” I snapped. “Bellona, grab Zerbrowski and get in position. Edward, you’re with me.” 

They glanced at each other and traded a meaningful look before shrugging. Bellona shouldered past me and stalked out the door. Edward fell into step behind me when I followed. 

“Where to?” he asked when we reached his pickup. We’d let Melanie, Demetri, and Richard off before making the detour to the docks. The truck seemed a little empty without our entourage to fill the back. 

“Emerson Central Fields.”


	31. Chapter 31

For years Emerson Central Fields had been the most heavily used thirty-acres in Forest Park, hosting events like the Great Forest Park Balloon Race and Glow and LouFest. Earlier in the year, the site had been closed off so that a recent five million dollar donation could be put to use renovating the area. Allegedly, the money would improve the turf on the soccer and rugby fields and add in a pavilion, concession area, and ADA accessible restrooms. 

The city was slow to move on most projects, and very little had been done. A few abandoned landscaping vans were parked up the road from the small fleet of vehicles Jeanette’s people had arrived in, but aside from that, the entire place looked deceptively barren. I knew beyond the copse of trees a small army gathered to face Mr. Oliver’s forces. 

Jeanette’s presence had an almost physical weight. Without even trying she exerted a pull, tugging me toward her side like a pole on a magnet. And it wasn’t just her marks. It had been like this from the beginning, to some degree. As much as I’d like to have been repelled, it’d never worked that way. We clicked. Master Vampire and necromancer. A moth to a flame. The question was, which of us was which?

When we stepped through the trees, I inhaled sharply. The ground sloped slightly, giving Edward and I a good view of the forces assembled below. 

Jeanette’s people were arranged in stunted column formations, each group gathering behind a different wereanimal or vampire leader. Malcolm stood at the head of a mixed group of vampires and therians, most of them sporting ARs or pump-action shotguns. A few of the older vampires, including Malcolm, wielded blades. Machetes, rapiers, and in Malcolm’s case, a cavalry sword. 

To Malcolm’s right stood Rafael, in rat-man form, leading the second column. A jostling, squeaking swarm of German Shepherd-sized rats gathered behind him. From my vantage point, and with the goggles still on, I couldn’t make out any familiar rats in the bunch. Claudia had to be down there somewhere. Would Dr. Lilian be fighting with the rodere as well, or was she standing by, ready to treat any wounded who staggered off the killing floor? 

Narcissa’s hyenas were massive, standing almost as tall as the handful of wolves on the battlefield. Her hyenas made up most of the third column, with only a few large gray wolves standing out from the wave of tawny fur and spots. Occasionally an eerie laugh rose from Narcissa’s side of the field, the nerves or excitement getting the best of one of the newer hyenas. The animal instincts were stronger just after infection. 

Edward and I strode through the narrow alley between columns, drawing the eerie, glittering green stares of almost every therian we passed. Edward and I were the only ones on the field wearing night-vision goggles. I was suddenly very aware that we’re the only completely human combatants on the field. For a suffocating second, I felt trapped, utterly outnumbered, a prey animal trying to escape the pitiless gaze of the predator. 

More heads whipped toward me, snouts scrunching as they caught the scent of my fear. My hands balled into fists at my sides. 

“I am not prey,” I warned the nearest hyena. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, him or myself. 

Musky fur and heaving breath surrounded us. I had the uncomfortable sensation a hairy beast was trying to digest me. 

Then we were through, striding toward the front of the procession, Edward toting a truly massive weapons case like it weighed nothing at all. I’d probably exceeded my clothing’s weaponry limit after we’d exited the car. I had two Firestars holstered in the modified back of the combat corset, two Brownings tucked into holsters on the duty belt, and an AR slung across my front. The pockets of the tactical pants and my coat bulged with spare ammo, and carefully hidden at the base of my spine, was my secret weapon. 

Jeanette stood straight-backed and regal, mounted on Richard’s back. Two more wolves flanked her on either side, carrying Yasmeen and Meng Die. Yasmeen was seated on the back of a sleek, almost feminine wolf, while Meng Die scratched the ears of a slightly larger wolf I didn’t recognize. 

I raised a brow at her when I came level with Richard. He flicked an ear, clearly annoyed to have a passenger. Still, he didn’t buck Jeanette off. It was something. 

“What, were they fresh out of horses?” 

“Ordinary horses would never come near this convocation, ma petite. Richard, Sylvie, and Jason can cross the distance faster than any vampire. If we can end Mr. Oliver quickly, his army of feral vampires will have no one to direct them. We aim to cut the head off the snake if you can pardon the hideously à propos metaphor.”

I almost told her spotted hyenas moved faster, but thought better of it. Jeanette didn’t seem to like Narcissa or her hyenas much.

“And Richard and the other wolves are okay with this?” 

“Richard proposed it after arriving here.” 

I traded a very brief glance with Richard. I had a hunch that the idea wasn’t entirely altruistic. He knew that Jeanette had to be elsewhere for this plan to have a prayer of working. Out of the line of fire, and preferably too far away to do anything when things seemed to go pear-shaped. 

So I nodded, accepting the statement without comment. I had to admit that she looked rather imposing, perched on his back, saber in one hand, knives glinting at her waist, strapped to her thighs, and an old-fashioned pistol tucked into a hip holster like an afterthought.

I wished I had more light. I wanted the damn night-vision goggles off so I could see her eyes clearly. Were they steely? Eager? Wary? Were they focused on my face, or at a point far in the distance? I couldn’t tell. 

“I trust your errand went well?” Jeanette’s voice betrayed nothing, compounding my frustration. 

I wanted someone to be as fucking unnerved by this as I was. Edward was unruffled as if he charged into bloody battles every day. Yasmeen and Meng Die were silent, sedate shadows on either side of Jeanette, dressed in pirate-chic, just like their Fearless Leader. If the wolves shared my unease, their lupine features didn’t convey it well. 

“It took longer than we expected, but we found what we were looking for. Bellona and Zerbrowski are in position. If they don’t receive a signal in two hours, they’ll proceed with Plan B.” 

We were silent for a time, and night sounds rushed in to fill the lull. The wind whistled through the trees, tossing leaves to the ground. The chatter of night creatures was absent. Every prey animal with half a brain cell had sought safer climes. Far in the distance, a siren wailed. We seemed to hold in a collective breath as we waited for our enemy to show his face. 

We didn’t have to wait long. 

Mr. Oliver’s people came bearing flashlights and homemade torches. We were far enough inland that Apep would have trouble striking. Even if we’d been at the river’s edge, the snake would have ignored us for as long as Mr. Oliver commanded. He’d allegedly given his word of honor to leave his big scaly beastie out of this.

His word meant jack all to me. Vampires like Oliver didn’t give a rat’s ass about fairness or honor. He’d fuck us over at some point, and when he did, we’d be ready. First step? We weren’t going to paint a visible target on our backs. 

At least the light was strong enough that I could remove the night vision goggles and get a look at them with my own eyes.

The torch-bearers were vanilla humans, all wearing costumes. Sexy nurses, gladiators, video game characters. I was willing to bet that Oliver had rolled a Halloween Party. He sent them shambling toward us, slow and easy to pick off. Your average zombie moved faster than this. They were easy targets, bait to lead us into the middle where we could be mobbed by feral vamps. 

The _Homo Erectus_ vampires hunched, quivering, ready to launch themselves at our front line. They made eager whimpers, like dogs begging for treats. There had to be hundreds of the damn things, and all of their focus was on Jeanette. 

“Fuck,” I muttered. 

“Indeed,” Jeanette agreed dryly. “I’ve wondered. Do you think it is better or worse that his main fighting force has no higher brain function?” 

“Honestly? It’s a fucking nightmare either way.”

Coordinating his feral vamps would be more difficult than letting them roam and he still had Apep to contend with. But no higher brain function meant they had a lot in common with zombies. Strong, fast, a limited capacity to feel pain, and utterly unafraid. If he lost his grip on them, they’d scatter. Easier to pick off, but also fiercer than they’d be under his command. 

Jeanette raised her voice above the wind. With so many keen ears around, she didn’t have to shout to be heard. 

“Oliver will give the signal at any moment. Leave the humans unmolested, if you could, mes amies. But when you encounter our true enemy...” She paused, then bared her teeth in a hungry smile. I had a feeling she’d searched for a way to give the order unironically for centuries. “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” 

A loud crack split the night air, and a red parachute flare burst into dazzling life over our heads. Nearly every neck craned to follow its trajectory. It was simply human nature to watch the light, even if most of the rubbernecking crowd weren’t technically human anymore. I used the split second to lean up on tiptoe and hiss into Richard’s ear. 

“If I die, I’ll take her with me, and vice versa, so keep her to the left of the field. If she collapses unexpectedly, retreat. Got it?” 

In answer, Richard’s ears flattened to the back of his head, his lips pulled back from his teeth, and he let out a snarl of challenge. His haunches bunched and then he was flying through the air, pounding toward the enemy line at a leftward angle, toppling a cluster of enthralled humans like tenpins.

Jeanette tried to use Richards's ruff as a pair of reins and turn him back. I was supposed to charge in at her side. I caught a flash of panic on her pale face before the darkness swallowed them both.

Every column followed Richard’s lead, loping toward the enemy line with squeaks, squeals, snarls, and even a few snickers from the hyenas. The swell of sound had goosebumps straining my skin as I broke into a jog. Therian energy washed over me like a scalding river breaking a levee. I could barely breathe, or force my way forward until the press of bodies thinned. Even Edward shuddered. 

“Christ, that makes my skin crawl.” 

We began a steady run, keeping pace with a straggler at the end of Narcissa’s line. I thought he seemed familiar and strained my memory trying to place him. I hadn’t met many of the werehyenas, so this had to be...

“Ares?” 

He bowed his head and gave another of those eerie laughs. He hunched down, offering me his back. I exchanged a glance with Edward. He waved me on. 

“Go get the Aztec bastard, Anita. I’ve got this. Just signal me when it’s done.” 

I had to hand the AR off to Edward before I could sling a leg over Ares’ back. The hyena’s back wasn’t designed to be ridden, so I’d have to cling onto his neck for dear life. I didn’t want to repay this act of gallantry with an accidental weapon’s discharge. 

_Just like riding a horse_ , I assured myself. _A big, carnivorous horse._

I lashed my arms around his throat and dug my knees into his flanks for balance like I was riding one of Grandma Blake’s horses bareback. The illusion was shattered almost immediately when I sank my hands into Ares’ fur. He was shaggy and warm, and the scent rolling off him was anything but equine. I pulled myself up as far as I dared and summoned my inner Clayton Moore.

“Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!”

Ares freaking _cackled_ and launched himself forward so quickly I almost lost my grip on his neck. The wind whipped at my face when I sat up a little straighter, reaching for the Browning tucked into the band at my back. The snaps came loose with satisfying ease and I drew my semi-automatic one-handed, sighting the feral vamp rushing toward us. 

The vampire had been some corporate fucker with a comb-over. He was still dressed in the remnants of a navy three-piece suit. A red power tie hung like a scrappy noose around his neck. He’d probably been six feet and change, but now he stooped, moving in short, fast bursts like a spider. I was confident that this wasn’t how Homo Erectus had actually moved. Was this Oliver’s idea, or just how feral vamps naturally behaved?

I didn’t trust my balance enough to grip the Browning with both hands. For accuracy and safety’s sake, I needed a two-handed grip. Recoil was no joke, and I’d be feeling this fight for days if we won. But at the moment, I’d take a sore wrist over the torn carotid the vampire would give me. 

The shot hit the feral vamp in the shoulder, spinning him counterclockwise, dropping him onto his butt before he could catch his balance. Blood fountained out of the wound, splashing another female vamp feet away. Like the male, she was dressed in her Sunday best. She could have been his wife, for all I knew. She staggered toward us, hands in rigid claws as she launched herself toward Ares, digging her fingers into his flank, coming away with handfuls of pulpy flesh.

Ares let out a primal scream and bucked, arching his body away from her. Unsteady as I was, it was enough to unseat me. I tumbled off his back and hit the ground back first, air exploding from my lungs in an undignified wheeze. I had to roll to avoid Ares' saucer-sized paws as he danced away from the female vamp. Hot spittle splashed my face, as he whipped his head toward her. I had time to see his jaws clamp down on her throat before comb-over vamp’s head eclipsed everything else. 

One or more of the rolled humans had dropped their torches. The dry earth had caught fire in places, casting flickering light over Emerson Fields. I could make out every flake of dried blood around the vampire’s mouth as it descended, fangs bared. My arm felt like jelly when I lifted my hand, jammed the business end of the Browning into the vampire’s maw, and pulled the trigger. 

I screwed my eyes and mouth shut as thick, sludgy blood and gray matter slopped onto my face. Bone fragments scored my skin, a dozen shallow cuts that also filled with gore. If I survived this, I was going to take a bath in isopropyl alcohol and rub myself down with a vat of triple antibiotic cream. Unnecessary for health and safety now that I bore Jeanette’s third mark but completely justified for my own peace of mind. 

I climbed to my feet and scrubbed my face free of the worst of the stuff. Even so, the taste of rancid blood lingered on my lips. I started forward on foot again tugging Jeanette’s cross from my cleavage, letting it spill into the night air. It lit up like a halogen bulb, shining squares of cruciform light into the faces of a pair of oncoming vampires. They balked a few feet away, raising their arms to shield their eyes, confused animal moans of pain slipping from their slack mouths. It took two shots to drop the red-haired female, and three to down the burly blonde man just behind her. 

I dared a peek at my surroundings, heart sinking when I spied bodies on the ground. Most weren’t enemy vampires. Vampire bodies lay very still, landing in splayed poses as if they’d just dropped dead where they stood. Dozens of four-legged bodies melted back to human men and women even as I watched. Black, White, Asian, Latino, short, tall, thin, and overweight. There were at least thirty dead already. More were on the ground, screaming, moaning, or trying to shift back. 

The feral vampires moved in packs, gathering around a therian to drag it down and kill it. It was uncannily like the way wolves and hyenas hunted. Maybe that was why the hyenas were faring the best. Most of the dead and dying were rats. But even the hyenas weren’t safe. Every so often a snake would rear from the grass and strike at an exposed heel, slithering away before they could be snapped up and thrashed to death. I spotted copperheads, cottonmouths, and at least three species of rattlesnake.

We were being fucking slaughtered. 

I emptied all four semi-automatics into oncoming feral vamps, only stopping the barrage long enough to shoot the head off a cottonmouth reared to strike Ares’ heel. The flames were growing brighter by the second, engulfing entire swaths of the field. I couldn’t see Jeanette, Richard, or Edward through the haze of smoke. I only knew Death was still stalking the field by the distinctive chatter of AR fire. 

I fumbled to reload, choking on smoke, dizziness turning the world on its head. The air was baking, flame licking along the ground. Every shadow stretched and contorted. Laughs, agonized screams, howls, and gunfire punched into the air, echoing from all sides. I needed to get out of the billowing black smoke. It seemed like there was more now than there’d been just a few minutes ago. And when I staggered free of the cloud, I saw why. 

A quarter of Mr. Oliver’s vampires had turned into kindling. A tanned blur moved among the skirmishing vampires and therians, resolving itself into Tonatiuh when it reached the end of the line. Every vampire he touched, friend or foe, turned into a torch, fire blooming across their chest before swallowing them whole. Fuck me, but Edward was right. Tonatiuh was a fucking firebug. 

The lamia struck me without warning. One moment I was swaying, dizzy and mesmerized by the smoldering vampires, and the next she’d thrown coils around my middle, squeezing until black spots burst in my vision. My ribs bowed, straining to their breaking point. For a suspended moment, I was absolutely sure she’d exert just a few more pounds of force and send bloody bits of rib bone into my lungs or heart. 

“Don’t move,” Melanie hissed. “Wait for the right moment.” 

She’d kept her voice low, but she needn’t have bothered. She could have screamed her instructions, and they’d still have been lost in the general din. 

It went against every instinct I had, but I stayed limp, eyes closed, and played possum. The lamia scooped me up and threw me over one shapely shoulder in a fireman’s carry before slithering toward the woods, where we’d lie in wait for the opportune strike.

This god was dead. We would kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The moth to a flame comparison between vampires and necromancers was made by MOAD in _The Harlequin_. I want to acknowledge if I'm lifting dialogue or concepts on purpose. I think the comparison is made in Ch 47.


	32. Chapter 32

Melanie settled in a nest of gnarled tree roots, binding my legs with one loose coil. I risked a peek through my lashes and found her peering through the copse of trees toward the battlefield. Firelight softened the line of her profile, gleamed off her dark hair, and painted her body in shades of orange and gold. There was no denying she was exquisite. She had a toned tummy but was missing a belly button. I supposed it made sense since she was part reptile. Would Melanie lay eggs, in the unlikely event she ever procreated? 

When she’d gotten comfortable, she cradled me to her chest, almost suffocating me between two very large, very firm, and very bare breasts. She squeezed me like I was a stuffed bunny and she was a homesick kid at summer camp. Pressed so close, I could hear her heart doing double-time. She was scared. I almost sought her hand, tried to give it a reassuring squeeze, but thought better of it. More than likely I’d grab something else, and now wasn’t the time to give the lamia a friendly grope. 

“I manm bweffe,” I said. Or at least _tried_ to say. 

Melanie released me with a wry chuckle, letting me pull my face a few inches from her cleavage.

“There are men and women who’d kill to be in your position, Ms. Blake,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Demetri spends hours on my breasts alone. Oh, the things he can do with the new tongue I’ve given him. And his tail, mmm...” 

Melanie ran the tip of her tail up my calf suggestively, and I got the idea. It was far more than I’d ever wanted to learn about her sex life. 

I felt Tonatiuh before I saw him. His power preceded him, creeping over my skin in the shiver I got sometimes just before dawn. An animator’s power was strongest at night, so we developed an uncanny knack for telling when the sun would rise. True dawn was still hours away, but with Tonatiuh came the false promise of sunshine. 

Through my lashes, I spied Tonatiuh step into the clearing, once again shirtless. The gold at his ears and beneath his lip glinted in the flames that wreathed his forearm like a flickering orange glove. The raised scars cast inky shadows on his arms, shapes that twisted and morphed as the light hit them. A trick of the light, or vampire mind games? I couldn’t tell. 

He quenched the flames at last. The eagle took flight as its master strode confidently forward, sure in his victory. The bird’s talons gouged furrows into Tonatiuh’s shoulder, though he barely seemed to notice. I squeezed my eyes shut as he approached. I was already too tense, and if he stood over us, he’d see the whites of my eyes. He’d smell the trap and bolt. 

His steps crunched to a stop a foot away from where we lay, and his voice carried rich and compelling, even over the backdrop of screams. 

“Melanie,” he said, a note of warning in his tone. “What happened to her face?”

The lamia shrank in on herself, shoulders hunching as though the question had been an open-palmed slap. 

“I d-don’t know, my lord,” Melanie answered, ducking her head. I thought I heard her sniffle. Either she was one hell of an actress or he really _did_ scare her that badly. “When I found her, she’d just killed one of Oliver’s feral pets. Perhaps she was injured during the fight, or when she was knocked free of her hyena mount.” 

A rich, rolling laugh burst from Tonatiuh’s throat and the sound was so unexpected it made me jump. Melanie covered my gaffe by shifting her coils, turning me further into her body. Which put me back where I’d started. Sore, buzzing with nerves, and trying not to think about how soft she was or how good she smelled. Her human shape was dewed with sweat, for fuck’s sake. She shouldn’t smell like cypress and tangerines. Why the fuck did she make me more nervous than the alleged Aztec god aiming to own me? 

“A warrior. Every report I received told me she would be. Precocious. Daring. Impetuous. The others will hate me for taking her. It makes her unsuitable for their plans, you know. Fuck them. Fuck them all. I’ve been waiting for this moment for too long. She’s perfect.” 

“The others?” Melanie echoed. “The Council, you mean?” 

“Fuck them,” Tonatiuh repeated, and the leaves rustled when he knelt by Melanie’s side. “Self-righteous fools. We’ll see how smug they are when we feed them their entrails. Nochtli would have wanted this. They stole from me, now I steal from them.” 

Tonatiuh’s speech grew more heated with every word, getting closer until he was shouting in Melanie’s face. Her body was rigid, her tail curling around me with more force than I liked, clutching me like a comfort object yet again. My nose was mashed into the side of her breast, and I really _was_ worried she’d smother me to death. A fine tremor started in her hands. 

“I want Demetri,” she whispered. “You made a promise. When Oliver is gone and the girl is yours, you’d let me roam.” 

“Of course. I am a God of my word, Melanie. When she is bound to me, you may take your consort and go. Hand her over now.”

Melanie hesitated for just a moment too long, and it cost her. There was a sharp, fleshy impact and a feminine cry of pain. Melanie’s entire torso rocked back from the blow, and fine beads of blood spattered my face. It took genuine effort not to twitch, to allow myself to be lifted like a rag doll from Melanie’s arms. To stay still, and not to take a swing at him for hitting Melanie. 

Funny, because just a few hours ago I’d meant to kill her. This was probably the closest I’d come to that strange phenomenon I’d seen between men in bar fights. One moment the fists were flying, and the next they were laughing over a fresh round of Budweiser. The difference was all in the framing; I supposed. I’d been shooting in self-defense. Down to the wire, it was my life or hers. Instinctive. 

This? This was cruelty and degradation for its own sake. He hit her because he could. Because she didn’t have the power or the will to hit back. 

Tonatiuh’s hands were like hot brands searing through the blood-slicked material of my shirt and coat. His arms closed around me, holding me to his chest, so warm that I wanted to scream. Even beneath the combat corset and tac pants, the burns I’d gotten in July flared. They were healed, for the most part, though even Jeanette’s vigorous feeding routine hadn’t erased them. My body had taken the energy and applied it where things were most dire. No metaphysical makeover for me.

But now, with his hands on me, I felt them again, bound by his body and set alight by his mere presence. I bit my cheek hard, gnawing until I tasted blood, trapped the scream in my chest where it battered painfully against my ribs. This wasn’t the moment. 

And I repeated it until I believed it, kept myself limp, though every cell in my body wanted to go for the blade secured to my back. It had to be done right. 

Tonatiuh’s fingers brushed my jaw, my cheeks, my eyelids, feathering heat along the planes of my face. If I’d been less lucid, it might have felt like basking in the sun on a warm summer day. His thumb brushed my lower lip, the touch tender like we were a pair of lovers enjoying the afterglow. 

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “Though that’s not a shock. Her line always valued beauty. She would have done away with you if you weren’t exquisite. Too proud. Always too proud. And not entirely practical. It would have set her back years, but...as I said, proud.” 

If he talked about Jeanette in the past tense again, I was going to twist the blade after it had gone in. She was still alive, damn it. I would keep her that way.

Tonatiuh threaded a hand into my hair, brushing it away from my throat. 

“Forgive me, flower,” he whispered, breath feathering still more heat over my tortured skin. 

Now. 

I twisted in his grasp, hand flying to the sheathed blade at my back in a move so swift it took even my captor by surprise. His grip had been gentle, and my sudden flurry of motion caught him off guard, gave me those few crucial seconds I needed to free the hunk of obsidian and surge forward, burying it up to its bone hilt into Tonatiuh’s chest. 

I put all my weight behind the blow, and his skin gave, ripping open with a soft squelch. Easy. Mechanical. The weapon might have differed from a stake or the large blades that Manny favored, but the process was the same. Tonatiuh had a heart, and just like everyone else, the base of that heart was located at the level of the third costal cartilage. 

Tonatiuh stared at the bone handle for a moment, raised his eyes to my mine, and then stared past me to where Melanie still lay curled at the base of a tree. His face split into a wide, toothy grin. He threw his head back and laughed. He laughed loud and long as if I’d just told the funniest joke in the world. 

Some of my anger gave way to terror. Melanie said any blade would work, but an obsidian blade would do him in the quickest. Had that been a lie? Was this just pissing him off? Her way of getting rid of me and the traitorous element in Mr. Oliver’s camp? 

“Nochtli’s finest blade,” he said wistfully. “Fitting, that I should die by it. I sent her on the errand that got her killed. This seems... poetic.” 

Tonatiuh’s hands flew up to cup my face, pressing his full lips gently against mine. He kissed me softly at first, then with more vigor, murmuring words I couldn’t understand over and over. His hands clutched my upper arms like steel bands, anchoring me to him. I couldn’t move. The warmth of his hands on me became a fierce burning that sank through the layers of cloth I wore and deep into my skin.

Tonatiuh breathed a last, tortured sound against my mouth when I twisted the dagger, obliterating his heart. And then he sank against me, nothing but dead weight. 

I withdrew the blade and shoved him off me, spending a few precious seconds hacking off the sleeve of my coat and the gray athletic shirt to examine the fresh wound. A mass of angry red lines strained my skin, too organized to be a simple burn scar. 

“The fucker branded me,” I hissed. I couldn’t tell what the shape was at the moment, but it was clear it wasn’t just a handprint. “What the hell is that?” 

Melanie slithered to my side, examining the brand critically. “An eagle feather, I think. It’ll be pretty when it scars.” 

“Like I need another one,” I muttered, wiping the blade off on the tac pants. “What was he saying there at the end? I don’t know the language.” 

“It was Nahuatl. I’m not precisely fluent myself, but I think it was... thank you.”

Emotion twisted beneath my ribs, and I tamped down on it viciously. I wouldn’t feel sorry for that son of a bitch. I wouldn’t. Tonatiuh would have let Melanie eat Dr. Hale. He’d helped Oliver. He was at least partly to blame for the deaths of my friends. And if he’d left well enough alone, we’d have been at the prison when it collapsed. Rory would have waited with the car. He might have survived.

“Where’d you hide the guns?” I asked, scanning the ground at our feet. “I know you don’t have them shoved in any orifices.” 

Melanie made a soft, amused sound and slid the last of her coils to reveal what she’d been sitting on. A pair of flare guns, this time to signal Edward. Two shots for victory, and phase two of the plan. One shot if things had gone wrong, telling them to get the fuck out of Dodge before an Aztec god brought his necromancer to bear. I wasn’t sure if I could control feral vampires for long, or if I could control as many as were on the field, but Tonatiuh would probably have made me try. 

Handling the flare gun hurt like hell. My burned arm felt stiff and swollen, and any motion at all sent ripples of pure agony along my over-sensitized skin. Of course, it would have to be a fucking burn. The universe just loved to fuck me sideways. 

There were more bodies on the field than when I’d left. Plenty of the charred piles were enemy vamps, but just as many weren’t. I couldn’t give a headcount just at a glance, but it was too many. It looked like half of what we’d brought to the field. It wasn’t just the acrid smoke that made my eyes burn. God fucking dammit. This was my fault. 

The ground quaked. Small shudders at first, as if the earth was reluctant to come alive. Leaves, rocks, and acorns jumped a few inches off the ground as the tremors grew. Mr. Oliver was going to renege on his bargain now that a goodly number of his army had been torched. Just like Edward had predicted.

My searching gaze found him crouched near a goal post, one hand pressed to the earth, the other extended toward an oncoming Jeanette. The ground around her sank downward, the earth swallowing her up to her waist. She clawed at the loose granules, tried to hoist herself out, but couldn’t find purchase. Oliver was going to bury her alive. He’d probably keep her there for weeks until she was desperate enough to blood-oath to him. 

That visual was seared behind my lids as I pointed the flare gun skyward. Melanie mirrored me, squeezing the trigger almost the instant I did. Two more red parachute flares blinked into life above the field, a set of evil crimson eyes glowering down at the bodies below. Everyone paused for just a moment to watch, even Mr. Oliver. Jeanette stopped sinking, buried up to her shoulders in the earth. 

And that was when Blaine and Barry Brewster swooped down like two snowy-winged avenging angels, hoisting him aloft by his head and feet. They gained altitude fast, carrying the writhing vampire with ease. Jeanette’s primer on Mr. Oliver had come in handy during the final planning stage.

Though Mr. Oliver could levitate, he rarely did, for fear of losing the bulk of his earth-based power. His animals to call were far below, unable to help. He could do very little against Blaine and Barry, even if they’d left all his appendages free.

His feral vamps, what was left of them at any rate, paused, blank confusion on their face as the flailing vampire lost his grip on their minds. Some enterprising therians took them to the ground, ripping at their exposed throats while they were helpless, but most simply stared as Blaine and Barry released Oliver two meters up. No one was really watching Edward, who’d knelt to open his case in the midst of the bloody, burning battlefield.

“Clear!” Edward shouted, hoisting an anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher onto his shoulder. He smirked when the pair of enormous, elegant swanmanes banked away from the plummeting vampire.

Edward’s shot caught Mr. Oliver a meter up. The resulting explosion made stars burst in my eyes. I didn’t see Mr. Oliver’s body fly apart, but I heard the thick, meaty thumps when bits of him hit the ground. And, distantly, I heard Apep’s scream as Bellona’s team executed their part of the mission. 

The hush that fell resonated through me, a quiet hum that buzzed through my hollow insides. No one wanted to move, to say the words, to jinx it. 

I shattered the stillness first, staggering through the maze of bodies, absorbing each one, trying to remember the fallen therians and vampires I hadn’t known, trying not to scream when I came across ones I had.

So many dead. So fucking many. I stopped counting when I reached a hundred. Too many. My fault. 

I dropped to my knees when I reached Jeanette’s side. Pain burned in my side, my legs, my wounded arm as I scooped the earth away from her. She helped me when I finally freed her hands. Others joined me, eventually, but I didn’t look up to see who. It didn’t matter. 

I felt god awful and probably looked worse, so it shocked me when Jeanette gathered me up in her arms and drew my face up for a kiss. I could have fought her. I could have told her no. But I didn’t. I clung to her, let her hair conceal my face like a dusky curtain. I kissed back so that no one would see the tears that slipped from the corners of my eyes. 

She was alive, and I was alive. That was a victory. Not a big one, considering what we’d lost, but still a victory. 

Why not let her celebrate?


	33. Chapter 33

“If they spin this any further, I think _Dead or Alive_ may have the right to sue,” I muttered. 

Ronnie snorted and took a swig of her energy drink, trying to hide a smile. Simon, who was trailing along just behind us tried to turn his laugh into a cough. There was a sort of dignified air one was supposed to maintain in the ICU, and I didn’t think that the families huddled outside sick rooms would appreciate a full-throated guffaw at the moment. 

“If you sing _You Spin Me Round_ , I'm going to dump my Red Bull on you. Did pitch wrong you in a past life? Because you murder it every time you try to carry a tune.” 

I smiled, despite the threat. This was the closest Ronnie and I had come to friendly conversation since August. 

“I don’t think Dr. Sopata would appreciate that. The burns on my arm still aren’t healed.” 

Fuck healed, they hadn’t stopped burning. The brand Tonatiuh left on my arm still looked fresh, despite the rate of healing on my other wounds. I was fuzzy on the finer points of the metaphysics, but Tammy theorized that Tonatiuh’s powers might be combating Jeanette’s. 

I’d heal this human slow, no matter how much energy my vampire master pushed my way. I could barely stand heat. It was why my dress was sleeveless, though the first hard frost had finally hit St. Louis. 

Ronnie frowned. “Sorry.” 

I sighed. There went the moment of levity. 

“Don’t worry about it, Ronnie.” 

“But I will,” she said, raising her voice a little. “I’ll always worry about you, Anita. No matter what, you’re my friend. I’m not going to stop giving a shit because we’ve had a disagreement.” 

We’d been having a whispered conversation as we strolled through the ICU, occasionally poking our heads in to check on friends, or in Ronnie’s case, family, that had ended up in the hospital during Mr. Oliver’s brief but incredibly violent incursion. The sentiment might have meant more to me if she hadn’t been giving me the cold shoulder for close to two months now. 

I must have inherited some of Jeanette’s tact through our bond because I didn’t point out the obvious hypocrisy in that statement and continued on as if she hadn’t changed the subject. 

“I want to know which Human’s First Advocate is sucking Senator Brewster’s dick under the rostrum. This bill is a fucking terrible idea.” 

And yet, support for it was growing, thanks in no small part to Mr. Oliver’s attacks on St. Louis. Maybe if he’d pulled this before the advent of cellphone cameras and internet forums, this could have been pushed under the rug by the Vampire Council. Not anymore. Fear had gone viral, crossing the U.S. like a fucking epidemic, causing riots in almost every major city. The only thing the Council could do was deny knowledge of his abilities and disavow his actions. 

Vampires were still legal, and I could only assume copious amounts of money had traded hands to make it happen. Jeanette claimed that, at last count, Belle Morte had slept with a fifth of the senate, a quarter of the House of Representatives, and at least three supreme court judges. I prayed she was exaggerating. The alternative was terrifying. 

With so many of our lawmakers bribed or fucked into compliance, Brewster’s proposed bill would have a tough time in the senate. But I was sure it would pass, eventually. Anyone who was paying attention could catch the flavor of the public’s anger. The overall death toll hadn’t been extreme, considering what Mr. Oliver had brought to bear. Five hundred and fourteen dead, and eight-hundred and eighty injured. And of the dead and injured, most had been people caught in the first attacks. After martial law had been imposed and resources allocated, vanilla humans had been safe for the most part. 

One hundred and fifty-four of the total fatalities had been ours. The twenty vampires willing to stand by Malcolm in the fight had been cut down in the first wave. They weren’t soldiers, just misguided people who’d died defending the only home they’d ever found. Jeanette lost twelve of her Kiss. Rafael had lost fifty-six rats. In the end, Narcissa’s people had been hit the worst, when Oliver had snapped over a dozen up and buried them alive, just as he’d been planning to do with Jeanette. She’d lost sixty-six hyenas total. 

Not that the public would ever give a damn. By necessity, the battle at Emerson Central Fields had been a clandestine affair. All credit was being heaped on the National Guard, RPIT, and disgustingly, Humans First, who’d been consulted by law enforcement and local news channels on how to vampire-proof a home. 

The nation had gotten a rude awakening to the realities that came with living next to monsters. The veil of political correctness had been whipped away to reveal the ugly truth, and people were fucking pissed. Anti-vampire and therian sentiment was high. Brewster’s bill would become law. I was sure of that. 

Ronnie sipped her Red Bull thoughtfully. “Would it be so bad? The way Channel 2 explained it, not much changes. You’d still report to who you’re answering to now. You’d just have federal funding and a badge from a newly minted government agency. The Federal Bureau of Supernatural Affairs sounds kinda spiffy. And you’re already state-licensed, so you’d be grandfathered in, no work on your part.” 

“If you read the fine print of the bill, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. They’re relaxing all the standards for state and federal certification for the FBSA. All you need is to pass a physical and a firearms test, and you can earn yourself a badge. Fuck training, fuck education, fuck background checks, fuck psych evals. Nope. All you need is to run fast and own a gun. They haven’t just lowered the bar, Ronnie, they’ve buried it in the turf. Do you know how many Human-Supremacist groups are going to jump on this bandwagon and ride it for all its worth?” 

Ronnie looked a little nauseous when the full implications of that hit home. “That’s... God. They’ll abuse the hell out of that.

“If they found the FBSA, the vampires and therians can kiss any peace of mind goodbye. The warrant system is already too vague. Executioners can and have used the loopholes in the law to get away with killing humans, not just the monsters. It’s almost a guarantee that at some point an FBSA Agent will take out a group of ‘two-biters’ and ‘fur-fuckers’ because he can. The language of the warrant will allow him to get away with murder.” 

“Sick fucks,” Simon muttered from behind us. It made me jump. He moved so quietly I’d almost forgotten he was there. 

“You know,” Ronnie said as we rounded the final corner to Detective Arnet’s room. “None of this is really going to endear her to the idea of turning furry. She’s probably going to scream at us until we leave.” 

“More than likely, but we have to try. I’ll make introductions and leave. She seems to hate my fucking guts.” 

“Why?” Simon asked. 

I shrugged. “It’s a lot of things, I think. She was new to the Taskforce. Eager to please, you know. With Dolph’s recent bad attitude, ‘friction with Anita’ was toeing the party line. RPIT brought in me because Mr. Oliver turned Eden. Coincidence, maybe. But it was my almost mother-in-law that cost her the hand. It was my vampire master he was after. I think in her mind, everything she’s lost can be laid at Jeanette’s feet, and by extension, mine.” 

“That’s not fair,” Simon muttered, and for some inexplicable reason, it sounded like Jessica’s attitude really bothered him. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” 

“Life isn’t fair. She can hate my fucking guts if that’s what helps her move forward. I’d love to be Miss Congeniality for once, but I can play the villain if it’ll get the job done. Besides, I have somewhere to be in an hour.”

Simon looked like he might say something, but snapped his mouth shut when we came level with Jessica’s room. The door was open, spilling a shaft of fluorescent light onto the floor and the end of the bed. Between the open door and the bright lights of the monitors, I could see Jessica just fine. She’d curled onto her side, facing away from the door, cradling the stump of her arm to her chest, trying to conceal it beneath the covers. She twitched once when Ronnie rapped her knuckles on the door. 

“Hey,” she called gently. “You’re Detective Arnet, right? I’m Veronica Sims. I was wondering if you’d talk with me and an associate for a moment.” 

Jessica didn’t turn. If it weren’t for the too-fast rise and fall of her chest and the tension between her shoulders, I might have thought she was asleep. It was a little after dusk. From what I could gather, every time they thought they purged the infection it came back again, and Jessica was losing bits every time. She was down to seven fingers and six toes. Dolph and Clive would live through their encounter with the vampires. It was still up in the air whether Jessica would. 

“Detective Arnet?” Ronnie repeated gently. Jessica didn’t answer, probably hoping we’d take the hint and fuck off.

For once, I knew exactly where Jessica Arnet was coming from. She was embarrassed and hurt, dependant in whole or in part on people she hadn’t answered to since graduating high school. If she miraculously pulled through, she’d lose her badge, her livelihood. Everyone who knew her would smile to her face and beat her down with the pity in their eyes. I knew Jessica. I’d been her.

Twice. 

And you’d never move forward if you wallowed in it. 

So I cleared my throat and chirped; 

“Excuse us, Detective. Do you have a moment to talk to us about Jesus Christ?” 

Jessica shot up like she’d been hit by a defibrillator. She rounded on me, fire in her eyes. 

“Jesus fucking Christ!” 

“Yeah, him.”

Ronnie shot me an unhappy look. It was easier than I could have dreamed to shrug off her disapproval. I’d meant what I’d said. Jessica needed a good swift kick in the pants to get her moving, and if she needed someone to blame when her ass smarted, I could be the name she cursed under her breath. 

We stepped in, and by the time we’d taken a seat around her bedside, she was already straining toward the button that would call the nurse. I carefully batted it just out of reach, trying not to flinch when Arnet speared me with a venomous glare. 

“Get the fuck out of my bedroom or I will scream,” she warned me. 

“Go ahead. But first, take these.” 

I flicked the handful of cards I’d been holding onto her bed. Business cards, mostly, though Rafael had scrawled his number on the back of one of mine. There were a few other names I could have given Arnet, but I wasn’t about to put her on Rania or Gabriel’s radar, no matter how nasty things got. I continued, ignoring the mounting fury on her face.

“In about ten seconds, I’m going to walk out that door and let you talk to Private Detective Veronica Sims and her therian friend about an alternative treatment option. These are the cards for the Oba of the St. Louis Cackle, the King of our local Rodere, and the Rex of the local Pride. If you actually listen to what Ronnie has to say and come to a decision, call one of them. Or trash the cards. I don’t give a fuck.”

“Oh, and become a peon in someone’s pack?” she sneered. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’re fucking the monster-in-charge. Bet she has everyone lining up to lick your ass.”

“Believe what you want, Arnet. It’s not worth dying for. You want to come at me? Try it when you have all ten digits. I don’t fight cripples.” 

The words tasted awful in my mouth, and I almost took them back. But the effect it had on Arnet was incredible. 

“Fuck you!” 

“Maybe someday. If you graduate from ass-licking.” 

“Anita-“ Ronnie began, alarmed. 

I stood up straighter and smoothed the frilly skirt of my dress. The tulle itched. Just when I thought she’d finally grasped my clothing preferences, she’d sent this monstrosity in the mail. 

“Don’t worry, Ronnie. I’m gone. Better places to be, you know.” 

A string of blistering curses followed me all the way out the door. Grandma Flores would have made her eat an entire Dial soap bar if she’d overheard. I was almost sure it had been too much and then, loudly; 

“Give me the lion’s number. I’m going to kick her fucking ass.” 

Simon’s soothing voice interjected, probably trying to talk her down. I couldn’t really hear over Jessica’s continued tirade. It didn’t matter. I’d heard what I needed to hear. 

I walked out of Mercy Hospital with a faint smile on my face. 


	34. Chapter 34

It was depressing just how stigmatized therian and vampire bodies were, even after death. The viruses were inert, completely harmless now that their hosts had passed on. Only a fourth of the dead were quietly retrieved by their families or the Church of Eternal Life. Which left one hundred and sixteen bodies unclaimed. There were only a handful of funeral homes that would prepare preternaturally-altered bodies for burial, and they charged out the nose. 

Jeanette paid the funeral expenses of every vampire or therian who’d died trying to defend her territory from Mr. Oliver’s attack. It didn’t matter if the bodies had been claimed or not. Somehow, someway, she’d gotten the funds into the proper hands. 

Any unclaimed bodies were laid to rest in a large, ornate mausoleum in Bellefontaine Cemetery. It had probably cost a fortune to buy outright, but Jeanette didn’t seem to care. Her expression had barely flickered the entire time we’d discussed the arrangements or planned the wake that would take place at Paramour. She hadn’t shed so much as a tear as they loaded the caskets into the burial vaults. 

It was a bad sign. A seemingly inscrutable Jeanette was often a deeply troubled Jeanette just under the surface. It didn’t make what had to happen any easier. 

Jeanette’s hand was still in mine, soft and limp like someone had placed their still-warm glove in my hand by mistake. She didn’t rise from her seat to follow the others when the blonde, boyishly handsome werewolf named Jason finished his speech and concluded the service. She didn’t move at all, except to track Richard in her periphery. The almost imperceptible downward curve of her lip was the only sign she felt anything at all about his presence at my side during the service. 

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the floral arrangements, searching for the words. This felt like the wrong time, and entirely the wrong place. But if not here, where? If not now, when? Sometime when the reminder of what she was and what she could cost me wasn’t as stark? It’d be easy to lose my nerve then, to try to find a compromise that would make her happier. 

Compromising. She was so damn good at it. And she was good at making me compromise too.

Every occupied vault in the mausoleum burst with color. Silk carnations, hyacinths, and forget-me-nots filled the individual crypt vases, and clipped to each was a small, flattering photo of each face. I tried not to cringe when I spied Graham’s face staring out from of the nearest. He was smirking at the camera, eyes twinkling with mischief, as though he was sure the person on the other end of the camera secretly adored him. 

Jeanette saved me the trouble of finding a tactful segue. Her words came out quiet and utterly bland. 

“You’ve chosen Richard.” 

Her face was impossible to read. Doubly so because of the cat-eye sunglasses she’d donned before the service. Just trying to appear aloof in front of the plebeian masses, or an attempt to hide from me? It was a real effort not to snatch them off her face and demand she look at me. 

“Yes,” I said. 

I pressed my lips together. I didn’t need to justify myself. Now she knew. Even so, I couldn’t force myself to stand and meet him by my Jeep. 

“May I ask why?” 

Damn it. 

“You won’t like the answer.” 

“I rarely do,” she said with a sigh. “But I would still like your reasons, ma petite.” 

I had to force myself to look at her. The coward in me wanted to stare down a carnation while we talked, but if I was going to break her heart, I could at least try to look her in the eye while I did it. 

“I can’t trust you.” 

Jeanette tilted her head very slightly in my direction. “Pardon?” 

“I can’t trust you, Jeanette. Every step of the way, you’ve manipulated me, striking bargains and pulling strings so I’d be right where I am now. At your side, bearing your marks. You put me in danger and your actions helped to permanently disfigure me. Even our ‘dates’ are based on a barter system. You don’t know how to have a relationship that isn’t based on exploitation, and even if you did, I don’t think this would work.” 

I pulled my hand free of hers gingerly, voice shaking a little. I was losing my cool. Why wouldn’t she look at me? Why couldn’t she just emote, damn it? 

“I understand why you’re this way. I understand why you did what you did. But understanding isn’t the same as forgiveness. And I don’t know if I can forgive you for everything you’ve done. How the hell could we even begin to build a foundation on something like that? The short answer is, we can’t. Or at least, I can’t. Not right now. Maybe not ever.” 

“And you believe you can trust Richard?” she asked, just a hint of disdain in her voice. “I doubt he’s been entirely honest with you either. Do you know he has the potential to be the new Ulfric of the Thronnos Rokke Clan? If had simply killed Marcus in a dominance fight and cast Raina out, the wolves would no longer live in fear. He values his own pretense of humanity more than the lives of his fellow wolves. To become Ulfric would be to admit that he is not only a monster but one of the worst around. He’s too self-involved to be in a relationship with anyone, human or otherwise.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.” 

Jeanette was on her feet in one fluid movement and striding away from me, back stiff, and hands clenched at her sides. 

“So be it,” she called over her shoulder. It sounded like she forced the words out through her teeth. “Call ahead if you wish to speak with me. I’m afraid no space is entirely safe if I’m single once more.” 

I watched her round the mausoleum’s corner and disappear out of sight, and pretended I hadn’t seen her shoulders shake, just the once. 

Richard was waiting for me, leaning against my bumper, propping his elbow on the Jeep’s spare tire as he reread a well-worn copy of _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. I was just betting that he was reading the Hounds of the Baskervilles for dramatic effect. 

“Are we ready to go?” he asked, an amiable smile curling his lips. 

It was a good smile. Disarming. Charming. Just a little flirtatious. I liked it a lot more than I should. But Jeanette’s words were there, lingering in the back of my mind like smoke that wouldn’t clear. 

“Could you really take charge of the pack with one dominance fight?” 

The smile dropped from his face in an instant. “Is that what she told you? Because it’s not that simple.” 

“I didn’t say it was. I just wanted to know a little more about the pack.” An image that was more dream than memory danced tantalizingly behind my eyelids for just an instant. “And about Raina in particular. Where’d she and Marcus meet, anyway?” 

“New Mexico, I think,” Richard said, tucking his book into the crook of his elbow, rounding the Jeep to climb into the passenger’s seat. “He’s a surgeon. He was in a residency program there when he got infected. So he hid it. You know that fucking law they passed in '06. If you get infected, you can only practice on therians or vampires. And even then, you have to get recertified. Total bullshit...”

He shook his head, expression twisting in disgust. 

“When Raina came in, she was in bad shape. Six arrows sticking out of her. Apparently, some maniac hunted her down with a compound bow. To hear Marcus tell it, she wouldn’t have survived if she hadn’t turned. He took a job here when he passed his boards and killed the last Ulfric of the Thronnos Rokke Clan. He’s been in charge ever since.” 

Something about the story tickled another memory. I’d track it down later, when we weren’t loitering in a cemetery after dark, with an angry vampire stalking the night. 

“So,” I began conversationally. “How about that dinner I promised you?” 


	35. Chapter 35

The average female American porn star actually has a much smaller cup size than I do—a perfectly average 34B. She’s also more likely to be a brunette than a blonde. She’s likely to be 5’5" and around ten pounds lighter than me. She’s more likely to be Caucasian than any other race. She’s probably human. Overall, she’s demographically average. 

But Dark Moon Studios wasn’t an average adult entertainment studio, and it didn’t hire average actresses. And it definitely didn’t hire humans. 

Marcus had indulged his fiance, letting her play out her tamer fantasies on screen, with as many partners as she liked. She had no less than three legal locations to shoot in, and probably a handful of others I hadn’t been able to pin down. Today Raina and her crew were shooting in the backyard of a McMansion in Wydown Skinker. 

I’d managed to sneak onto the set without being noticed. No one was looking at me and I couldn’t really blame them, given the show the performers were putting on. 

A woman in half-leopard form sprawled cat-like at the bottom of the mansion’s empty pool, wearing nothing but a pair of rollerblades, knee pads, and a smile. A man in a gimp mask positioned himself behind her, stroking her furred thighs reverently before sliding the tip of himself inside her gleaming sex. It was so damn strange even I had a hard time not looking.

The woman gave a throaty purr before slamming herself backward, enveloping the man’s entire length. He hissed out an eager, “Oh God, yes!” and I could finally tear my eyes away.

Raina was splayed over the director’s chair like an erotic decoration, watching the action play out with an eager baring of teeth. Occasionally she’d give instructions or offer critique, but mostly, she watched, toying with the hardened peak of one nipple through her sheer pink blouse.

“Ms. Wallace?” I asked, raising my voice over the continued moans of the leopard-woman's performance. 

Raina sat up straighter, glancing over her shoulder, scanning the crowd until she found me half-concealed by one of her burly cameramen. When she clapped eyes on me, the hungry smile grew. She slung her legs over the side of the chair and strode toward me, every roll of her hips oozing suggestion. 

“Anita Blake,” she cooed. “One of St. Louis’ unsung heroes. What brings you to my door today? Care to audition?” 

“Not really an exhibitionist, I’m afraid.” I lifted a takeout bag from Lombardo’s Trattoria to eye level. “But I brought food. I thought we might have a chat.” 

Raina’s lip curled in a sultry little pout. “All talk and no play? That makes for a dull girl. Poor Richard will get bored." 

“Do you want the linguine Lombardo or not?”

She laughed and seized the bag from my outstretched hand. “Alright. Come to the kitchen. We’ll talk.” 

I dutifully followed her through the dining room, into the den, down a hall, and finally to the kitchen. Each space was lavishly furnished but still seemed strangely empty. There was no lived-in feel here. The decorations were a sort of reflection of what was happening outside. Mechanical. Done for aesthetic and expectation, not for pleasure. 

Raina folded herself into a stool at the kitchen island and tucked into the linguine with a sound of relish. 

“So what have you come here for, Anita?” she said, a dangerous twinkle in her amber eyes. 

I didn’t quite meet them directly. I wasn’t sure which parts of the legends were true, and which weren’t. Not yet, anyway. Better safe than sorry. 

“The food is a nice gesture,” she continued, taking a bite. “But ultimately useless. Cute as your confidence is, I don’t take violations of my territory lightly. Richard should have warned you not to trifle with me.” 

“He did. He told me all about you. About what you like to do to submissive pack members, all the people you’ve raped. All the people you tortured. All the ones you killed. He told me you breed fear, and that you get off on it. In fact, I’ve seen and felt your handiwork firsthand through Jeanette.”

Raina’s brows shot up. “And yet you still came. Why?” 

My mouth twitched up at the corners, though the smile was far from pleasant. It left my eyes cold and, in some ways, as dangerous as hers. 

“Because I know something he doesn’t. I figured something out during his delightful little storytime. Something you should be very fucking relieved I haven’t shared. Not even with Richard.” 

“And what’s that?” 

I leaned my elbows on the island and leaned in conspiratorially, still smiling. 

“You’re not a werewolf, Raina. You never were. Marcus knows it, and now I do too.” 

Raina went very still, a forkful of linguine poised in mid-air. She didn’t even try to stop it when it slopped back onto the styrofoam to-go box. 

“Of course I am,” she managed after a moment. “I’m Lupa and Bolverk of the Thronnos Rokke Clan. Do you think Marcus would award me such positions if I were human?” 

I wagged a finger at her. “Oh, I didn’t say you were a vanilla human. Just not a werewolf. Or at least, not _only_ a wolf. Because skinwalkers can take on more than one form, isn’t that right?” 

Raina went still again, her expression devoid of any hint of playfulness now. Her amber eyes were suddenly more luminous, her mouth an angry red slash across her face. Her skin grew a little darker, and her voice held a hint of growl when she spoke. 

“No one will believe you.” 

“You don’t think so? The law takes magical malfeasance very seriously. And that's what you do. You were a witch once. The worst kind of witch, even when you were completely human. You had to kill your family to get this power, didn’t you?” 

She was silent, so I continued. 

“I’ll give you almost the same terms I gave Melanie. You play ball with Jeanette. If you lay a finger on her again, and I will blow the whistle on you so fast it’ll make your head spin. Do we understand each other?”

Raina’s smile was suddenly back, and this time it was full of teeth. Jagged, mismatched teeth. Her eyes were like twin lanterns in her face, and her voice was like crushed gravel when she spoke. 

“Perfectly. And know this, Anita Blake. I will come for you. I will make your life a misery. When I am through, you will beg me to kill you. I will be your waking nightmare.” 

I’d watched her dance with wild abandon in Dr. Hale’s nightmares. I knew she danced a few rows back from the flames, but not cloaked in darkness. There was worse out there than Raina Wallace. I’d seen it. 

I grinned back. “Bring it, bitch.” 


End file.
